Pictures at an Exhibition Read Online Free PDF

my underthings, did you? Did you find my diary? No? Well, that's because I don't keep one. For exactly this reason.”
    She swept past me into her room. The door remained open.
    “What a mess you've made,” she said, and examined me, hand on hip. “Enough already! We have business to discuss.”
    Rose pushed aside the clothes and the damp towel on her desk chair and threw the things in a heap on the floor. She perched at the foot of her bed, rolling an unopened can of beans on the carpet back and forth with her stockinged foot.
    “How are your studies?” she asked.
    “Fine,” I replied, my throat dry.
    “You should assert yourself more,” she said. “I think you have a fine mind.”
    “Thank you,” I said. She took out a cigarette and waited for me to light it, which I did.
    “Tell me, what did I do wrong?” She picked a flake of tobacco from her tongue. “I know from that Swede that your father takes his assistants to visit the artists in their studios. I bought a new dress the week he had the appointment with Braque.” She blinked forcefully and looked out the window. “I was planning to wear it and return it with the pockets sewn. But I'm never invited. I've waited four weeks, and I know he's visited at least that many studios. It's past Easter; soon the high season will be over. I need to know what the artists are working on to stay current and useful.”
    “I don't know what you did wrong,” I said, both wanting and not wanting to leave.
    “Then find out,” she said, “or I cry about you sneaking around my room and getting your grubby fingers into my things.”
    “I didn't do that.”
    “But you thought about it. Tell me what you know.”
    I inhaled. “You talked about money,” I said. “That was your mistake. You told the Princess Noailles the Gauguin was a good deal.”
    “That woman is a princess?” Rose stabbed her cigarette onto the dinner plate. “Why does she dress like that, with her horrid lipstick smeared on her teeth? She kept spitting in my eyes while she talked. What an awful woman!” Rose put her hands over her face.
    “Don't take offense,” I said, “because I think you will.”
    “I promise. Give me something to swear on.” The can of beans rolled under the bed. “Zut,” she said. I stretched out my leg to find it and our knees touched. My foot located the can, and I sent it back in her direction.
    “It's a custom. The princess, on the one hand, expects everyone to know she's filthy rich. How rich, and how she spends her money, on the other hand, is a private matter. So she can dress in a fur that's been dead fifty years and have her chauffeur drive her around town in a rusty old box. ‘To live happy, live hidden.’ She never ever talks about money. I doubt she knows how much she pays for anything. Her solicitor handles it and makes a heap for himself.”
    “I was just making conversation. What can one say to those people?”
    I shook my head. “Don't ever mention a price unless someone asks you. Pretend you hadn't even considered that money was involved. Turn to my father, as if you're saying, Mr. Berenzon, you handle this mystery.”
    Rose chewed her lip. “How long until I can visit a studio?”
    I shrugged. “I have no idea. You know Father won't speak with me about his business.”
    “You had heard about the princess.”
    “That was said in passing to my mother, who also despises her.”
    “Why?”
    “She's an anti-Semite. She makes a show of leaving the orchestra early when they play Mendelssohn or Offenbach.”
    “Yet she still buys paintings from your father.”
    “True, but he is not the artist, nor is he her dinner guest.”
    I waited for Rose to comment on the injustice of it, but she only looked pleased with understanding the puzzle and its pieces.
    FATHER HAD BEEN TO VISIT MATISSE IN HIS MEDITER- ranean sanctuary on Cimiez Hill, with its cages of doves, Moroccan tapestries, and views of the Roman ruins. Father loved the South in the winter,