. He wished he had never told Mrs. Westley
how Cornelia had earned the money for her studies at the Synthesis; he
resented the implication of her need, and Mrs. Westley vaguely felt
that she had somehow gone wrong. She made haste to retrieve her error
by suggesting, "Perhaps Miss Maybough would object, though."

"That's hardly thinkable." said Ludlow lightly. He would have gone away
without making Mrs. Westley due return for the trouble she had taken
for him with Mrs. Maybough, and she was so far vexed that she would
have let him go without telling him that she was going to have his
_protegee_ pour tea for her; she had fancied that this would have
pleased him.

But by one of those sudden flashes that seem to come from somewhere
without, he saw himself in the odious light in which she must see him,
and he turned in time. "Mrs. Westley, I think you have taken a great
deal more pains for me than I'm worth. It's difficult to care what such
a poor little Philistine as Mrs. Maybough--the mere figment of somebody
else's misgotten money--thinks of me. But she _is_ to be regarded, and
I know that you have looked after her in my interest; and it's very
kind of you, and very good--it's like you. If you've done it, though,
with the notion of my keeping on in portraits, or getting more
portraits to paint, I'm sorry, for I shall not try to do any. I'm not
fit for that kind of work. I don't say it because I despise the work,
but because I despise myself. I should always let some wretched
preoccupation of my own--some fancy, some whim--come between me and
what I see my sitter to be, and paint that."

"That is, you have some imagination," she began, in defence of him
against himself.

"No, no! There's scope for the greatest imagination, the most intense
feeling, in portraits. But I can't do that kind of thing, and I must
stick to my little sophistical fantasies, or my bald reports of nature.
But Miss Saunders, if she were not a woman--excuse me!----"

"Oh, I understand!"

"She could do it, and she will, if she keeps on. She could have a
career; she could be a painter of women's portraits. A man's idea of a
woman, it's interesting, of course, but it's never quite just; it's
never quite true; it can't be. Every woman knows that, but you go on
accepting men's notions of women, in literature and in art, as if they
were essentially, or anything but superficially, like women. I couldn't
get a picture of Miss Maybough because I was alwa