all their having lived in the great maelstrom
of London, he found his superficial experience of life larger than that
of mother and daughter. They had never seen machinery at work, did not
know the difference between an elm and a beech and had never read Sir
Walter Scott. Mrs. Seddon, thin, careworn and slackly good-natured,
ever lamented the loss of an astonishingly brilliant husband; Jane was
markedly the more competent of the two. She had character, and, even
while slaving for the romantic youth, made it clear to him that for no
other man alive would she so demean herself. Paul resolved to undertake
her education.

The months slipped by golden with fulfilment. News of the beautiful boy
model went the round of the studios. Those were simpler times (although
not so very long ago) in British art than the present, and the pretty
picture was still in vogue. As Mr. Rowlatt, the young architect, had
foretold, Paul had no difficulty in obtaining work. Indeed, it was
fatally easy. Mr. Cyrus Rowlatt, R.A., had launched him. Being
fabulously paid, he thought his new profession the most aristocratic
calling in the world. In a remarkably short time he was able to repay
Barney Bill. The day when he purchased the postal order was the
proudest in his life. The transaction gave him a princely feeling. He
alone of boys, by special virtue of his origin, was capable of such a
thing. Again, his welcome in the painting world confirmed him in the
belief that he was a personage, born to great things. Posed on the
model throne, the object of the painter's intense scrutiny, he swelled
ingenuously with the conviction of his supreme importance. The lazy
luxury of the model's life appealed to his sensuous temperament. He
loved the warmth, the artistic setting of the studios; the pictures,
the oriental rugs, the bits of armour, the old brocade, the rich
cushions. If he had not been born to it, why had he not remained, like
all 'the youth of Bludston, amid the filth and clatter of the factory?
He loved, too, to hear the studio talk, though at first he comprehended
little of it. The men and women for whom he sat possessed the same
quality as his never-forgotten goddess and Lady Chudley and the young
architect--a quality which he recognized keenly, but for which his
limited vocabulary could find no definition. Afterward he realized that
it was refinement in manner and speech and person. This quality he felt
it essential to acquire. Accordingly he p