haps if I could get more action--more of the warmth which goes with
action----?"

"It would affect the flesh tint, certainly. You should see me
pirouetting at Dupres'--a peony isn't in it."

"I should like to see you," I said, jumping at a probable solution of my
difficulties, "particularly in daylight. One gets better to the core
of----"

"With women," Laura interrupted, "it's safest to reject the core."

"Cynic. You admit the downiest have the hardest hearts--like peaches,
eh?"

"I didn't mean to be cynical. You can avoid the hard part. It is better
than choosing the human plantains that have none: smooth, soapy, insipid
things, they clog in no time."

"But pears eat straight through--sweet to the pip," I said, gazing
quizzically at my latest sketch. "Betty is a pear."

Laura laughed generously.

"Foolish boy, keep your illusions. You can clean your brushes in them.
Degas saw wonderful things in his models--things hidden from the vulgar
eye."

"I am glad you mentioned Degas. I mean to see more than this Betty of
the Ballet. Take me to your class."

"Oh, I don't dance in the class. I have a private lesson when the girls
are gone. You can come this afternoon at four."

We made a long journey on the top of an omnibus to a hole somewhere in
Lambeth. Squalor appeared to grope under railway arches, and penury to
moan through flapping fragments of clothing that swung at intervals
along the narrow paths, behind rows of second-hand furniture and groups
of dishevelled infants.

"A choice locality," I growled.

"Cheap," exclaimed Laura. "When you put your shoulder to the wheel you
mustn't mind greasing your jacket."

She was a plucky girl--glad, like many others, to grasp the only
opportunity of self-support. My uncle, a Cheshire parson, had died
peacefully, leaving four girls and six boys with bucolic appetites to
the charge of Providence.

"Here we are at last," my cousin said, leaping down with agility, and
hardly stopping the omnibus for her exit.

We alighted almost in front of a quaint building which looked like an
excrescence--a wart--on the visage of a dilapidated chapel. Laura led
the way up a garden in size somewhat larger than a postage-stamp, where
two heartseases, sole invaders of the desolate gravel, tried to blink
golden eyes through a canopy of dust. The door was opened by a youth who
mingled an air of proprietorship with the aspect of a waiter at a
third-rate cafe. He waved a hand to rooms,