ple!" He shrugged
wearily.

"If you meet a woman and like her, don't you want to know all there is
to know about her?" inquired Barres.

"I should say not!" returned the other with languid contempt. "I don't
wish to know anything at all about her."

"Well, we differ about that, old top."

"Religiously. A woman can be only an incidental amusement in one's
career. You don't go to a musical comedy twice, do you? And any woman
will reveal herself sufficiently in one evening."

"Nice, kindly domestic instincts you have, Trenor."

"I'm merely fastidious," returned the other, dropping his cigarette
out of the open window. He rose, yawned, took his hat, stick and
gloves.

"Bye," he said languidly. "I'm painting Elsena Helmund this morning."

Barres said, with good-humoured envy:

"I've neither commission nor sitter. If I had, you bet I'd not stand
there yawning at my luck."

"It is you who have the luck, not I," drawled Trenor. "I give a
portion of my spiritual and material self with every brush stroke,
while you remain at liberty to flourish and grow fat in idleness. I
perish as I create; my life exhausts itself to feed my art. What you
call my good luck is my martyrdom. You see, dear friend, how fortunate
you are?"

"I see," grinned Barres. "But will your spiritual nature stand such a
cruel drain? Aren't you afraid your morality may totter?"

"Morality," mused Esme, going; "that is one of those early Gothic
terms now obsolete, I believe----"

He sauntered out with his hat and gloves and stick, still murmuring:

"Morality? Gothic--very Gothic--"

Barres, still amused, sorted his wet brushes, dried them carefully one
by one on a handful of cotton waste, and laid them in a neat row
across the soapstone top of his palette-table.

"Hang it!" he muttered cheerfully. "I could paint like a streak this
morning if I had the chance--"

He threw himself back in his chair and sat there smoking for a while,
his narrowing eyes fixed on a great window which opened above the
court. Soft spring breezes stirred the curtains; sparrows were noisy
out there; a strip of cobalt sky smiled at him over the opposite
chimneys; an April cloud floated across it.

He rose, walked over to the window and glanced down into the court.
Several more hyacinths were now in blossom. The Prophet dozed
majestically, curled up on an Italian garden seat. Beside him sprawled
the snow white Houri, stretched out full length in the sun, her
wonderf