— "I would rather stay near you, and I wish you would stop looking at those dreary leaves."
Johnsy said, closing her eyes so that she looked as rigid as a statue: "Tell me, then, as soon as you finish your work, for I want to see the last leaf fall. I am tired of waiting and weary of thinking. I want to be freed of everything and drift down to the depths, as these trembling leaves do."
— "Try to sleep. I shall call Uncle Behrman to take him as a model for the old hermit workman, and I shall not be away more than a single minute — so don't make a movement before I come back."
Uncle Behrman lived on the ground floor below them. He was an artist past sixty years of age, and with his long white beard he looked like a picture of Moses by the brush of Michelangelo. He often talked of the masterpiece he was going to paint one of these days. For forty years he had been passing his brush over canvases without drawing near the sacred temple of art; rather he had painted a few trifling pictures for the advertising companies. He lived on the meager wage he earned as a model for young artists whose material means did not allow them to pay the wage of a professional model. He was excessive in his drinking and in talking of his awaited masterpiece. He hated weakness and softness and tried to show himself a hard man, and he had set himself up as protector of the two artists, Sue and Johnsy.
Sue found him in his wretched, dark room, in one corner of which stood a blank canvas he had placed there twenty years before, to paint his masterpiece upon. The smell of drink hung about him as Sue told him of the delusion that had taken hold of her friend Johnsy, and how, in her state of weakness, she seemed like a trembling leaf, and it was not unlikely that she too would fly away if the world pressed too close upon her.
He cried out: "What? Are there people who think such childish twaddle? She dies as soon as the last leaf falls? I never heard of such a thing before. No... I will not be a model for
the crazy hermit. Tell me — how did you let these silly ideas nest in her brain? Ah, poor little Miss Johnsy."
"She is very sick and weak, and the fever has left fancies and
imaginings in her head. But I shall leave you, since you refuse to be a model — though that will not keep me from telling you that you are a rude old man, wicked as the devil."
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