Free The Dark Lady by Louis Auchincloss, Thomas Auchincloss Page B

collector and his friend alone to contemplate a selected number of rarities. Irving would sit silent before a canvas or a statue for as many as fifteen minutes at a time, and Elesina loved the peace of such periods. It seemed to her that she was witnessing a kind of draining, as if whatever was finest in the masterpiece were somehow passing into the silent, crouching acquisitor. She began to see what Irving meant when he said that art was only communication, that if the recipient could take in the beauty in its totality, he might become the equal of the creator.
    On an afternoon of particular peace and pleasureableness Elesina sat with Irving in a mauve-curtained show room before five French eighteenth-century paintings: two Bouchers, a Fragonard, a Greuze and a Charpentier. The sexuality of the scenes was intense: alabaster nymphs with large exposed thighs and breasts clutched ineffectively at silken undergarments to excite or frustrate peeking gallants; a wife in nightdress sent a flying kiss to a departing husband as a lover concealed behind her bed clutched her free hand in anticipation; a naked girl on a red couch contemplated her painted cheeks in a mirror held in one hand while the other fingered her crotch; a panting Leda submitted to the violent attentions of a huge lusting swan against the background of a riverbank which provided an audience of leering flowers.
    "The Frenchwoman of that era was your sex at its most superb," Irving commented placidly. "Woman was at her most feminine: every chateau, every piece of furniture or porcelain, every medallion, every bit of drapery, every fan, every loop and tassel bespoke the charming, the worshiped female. Not for those girls was the law degree, the medical career. Ah, no! They knew that the way to power was to be irresistible to men. And the century was theirs! Marie Antoinette, Sophie Arnould, the Du Barry, Catherine of Russia. It is hard to point to a statesman except Frederick of Prussia—and he liked the boys—who was not under petticoat influence."
    "Until we come to America."
    "Exactly. Martha Washington. What aridity! What puritanism! That was a man's world, of business and of politics. And in the nineteenth century men reduced it to business alone. What could the poor women do but strut around in diamonds and Irish lace and give balls? Compare the Mrs. Astor with Madame de Pompadour!"
    Elesina was filled with a sense of ease and laughter. Laughter at herself and laughter at him. How beautifully he had planned it all! The champagne that she had drunk at lunch made her pleasantly drowsy; the pink and white flesh tints in the sexy French scenes titillated her. There were no nude males in any of the canvases to offer an unlovely contrast to Irving's own plump figure or gray hairs. The lusting swan was all there was to suggest the copulating male. Nothing in Irving's words or his demeanor betrayed the amorous old man, the ludicrous Pantaloon of comedy. He preserved his dignity, nay, he preserved his superiority—the superiority of his greater years and experience and wealth, of his venerable old bull maleness—without the least remission. He was like some eminent doctor, the last authority in his field, whose diagnosis she had sought and for an appointment with whom she had waited anxious hours in a crowded anteroom. Now she was in his office, the holy of holies; she had stripped off her last stitch behind a scanty curtain at his gruff instruction and was about to step forth, shivering, to expose herself to his grave contemplation.
    "And where does that leave the poor twentieth-century female?" she demanded.
    "With everything before her. There is nothing women did in the past they cannot do in the present."
    "Oh, pooh, Irving, you know that isn't so. You speak of women giving men an ideal. What woman ever gave you yours? Your ideal was to create a temple of beauty at Broadlawns, and you've done it. You could have done it as a bachelor."
    "No, my dear, I