The Young Lady in Blue by Adeline Adams — Read

As my wife says, I am by nature unduly sensitive to beauty. You would hardly expect this fault in a sculptor-you who perhaps judge all sculptors from the war memorials you have seen. And with me, the worst of it is, I am even more susceptible to color than to form. My long acquaintance with form has put me on my guard against its wiles, and my joy in beautiful shapes is forever enhanced by the free play of my critical faculty. But in the presence of lovely color, I am unarmed, weak-kneed. All I can do is to take pleasure in it, for I do not know enough about it to be critical, in any satisfying way. This explains why I fell, and fell far, for the young lady in blue. I admit that I would not have done for Senator Bullwinkle just what I did for her.

Yet, when I first saw the young lady, she was not in blue, if you forget for a moment her forget-me-not eyes. She was in deepest black, and, I have reason to believe, the most expensive and fashionable black to be had in New York. Gigi Arcangelo, my seldom-sinning super-assistant, broke all the rules of the studio when he let her in, that bright May afternoon. Gigi knew perfectly well that after a vexatious sitting from Senator Bullwinkle (who, in order to keep awake while posing, always had his speeches of a decade ago read aloud to him by my wife) I would be in no mood for trifling with mere beauty. Gigi knew that I needed three hours of uninterrupted work on my head of Christ, before I could well show it to an enlightened Bishop; he knew that I was behind with my Iowa figures; he knew that my bust of General Daly ought to have been finished, boxed, and shipped a month before; he knew that my big clay relief of the Spanker-Sampson children had developed a crack across the nose of the middle boy, making him look more cross-eyed than he really was, so that his likeness was wholly unfit for the inspection of a fond and fabulously rich Middle-Western aunt, due to arrive on the Wednesday. In short, Gigi knew that I was counting on this priceless afternoon, of all the afternoons of my life, to justify, yes, to glorify, my career as an artist. And to think that at such a time as this, he could show in that girl, simply because, as he afterward explained, to do otherwise would have been, for him, _impossibile_, she was _si bella, bella_! Gigi shared my weakness, you observe; he too was pledged to beauty.