The Amouretta Landscape by Adeline Adams — Read

That summer, Maurice painted many other landscapes. There were falls, brooks, and rocks in that glamorous country, and these he showed in their beauty as he saw it. There was also an enchanted road under enchanted pines, where he once beheld Paolo and Francesca walking at twilight; this too became matter of record, to be taken up later and played with for heart's delight. Rumors of his latest work reached the art galleries. New Yorkers know those galleries, dotting the Avenue from the Library to the Plaza, and even blossoming out into side streets of lower rental. And the merry war between artist and dealer, as eternal and various (and perhaps as little reasonable) as the war between the sexes, would be taken up with renewed vigor in the autumn. Price had received letters from the Abingdon, the Buckminster, the Clarendon; from As You Like It, even, as well as from Farintosh and from MacDuff. The letters were similar in content; their writers had heard of his landscapes-a new line for him, was it not? The buying public would be interested, of course, and would he care to exhibit in their well-appointed galleries? They would be glad to hear from him at his early convenience. Price smiled, and answered, declining.

In fact, he was interested, not financially but sympathetically, in a gallery from which he had received no letters; -an out-of-the-way little gallery, a modest ground-floor-and-mezzanine affair slowly becoming better known and liked as the Court of New Departures. He was interested because this fantastically named refuge for originality in art was a business venture (a venture that must be _made_ to succeed! ) undertaken by Hal Wrayne, a madcap young cousin. Hal Wrayne's father had always kept this only son of his well-supplied with means for cutting up harmless capers, at school and in college; and Hal himself, both by nature and by training the perfect comedian in life, had hardly stopped to ask where he was going, all so joyous, until, on his father's sudden death, he found himself almost penniless, with a wife and baby daughter to support, and with a mother and sister who needed his help.