self out. Miss Desprey turned pale.

"No," she gasped; "I couldn't take anything like half so much for the
whole thing."

Bulstrode said coldly:

"I'm afraid I must insist, Miss Desprey; I couldn't order less than a
fifteen-hundred dollar portrait. It's the sum I have planned to pay
when I'm painted."

"But a celebrated painter would paint it for that."

Bulstrode smiled fatuously.

"Can't a man pay for his fads? I want to be painted by the person who
did that portrait over there, Miss Desprey."

In a tiny studio--the dingy chrysalis of a Bohemian art
student--Bulstrode posed for his portrait.

Each morning saw him set forth from the Ritz alert and debonaire in his
fastidious toilet---saw him cross the Place Vendome, the bridge, and
lose his worldly figure in the lax nonchalant crowd of the Quarter
Latin. At the end of an alley as narrow and picturesque as a lane in a
colored print he knocked at a green door, and was admitted to the
studio by his protegee. In another second he had assumed his
prescribed position according to the pose, and Miss Desprey before her
easel began the _seance_.

On these May days the glass roof admitted delightful gradations of
glory to the commonplace _atelier_. A few cheap casts, a few yards of
mustard-toned burlaps, some Botticelli and Manet photographs, a mangy
divan, and a couple of chairs were the furnishings. It had been
impossible for Bulstrode to pass indifferently the venders of flowers
in the festive, brilliant streets, and great bunches of _girofle_,
hyacinths, and narcissi overflowed the earthenware pitchers and vases
with which the studio was plentifully supplied. The soft, sharp
fragrance rose above the shut-in odor of the _atelier_, and, while Miss
Desprey worked, her patron looked at her across waves of spring perfume.

Her painting-dress, a garment of _beige_ linen, half belted in at the
waist and entirely covering her, made her to Bulstrode, from the crown
of her fair hair to the tip of her old tan shoes, seem all of one
color. He had taken tremendous interest in his pose, in the progress
of the work. He would have looked at the portrait every few moments,
but Miss Desprey refused him even a glimpse. He was to wait until all
manner of strange things took place on the canvas, till "schemes and
composition" were determined, "proper values" arrived at, and he
listened to her glib school terms with respect and a sanguine hope that
with the aid of such p