ra give. After a life spent in a home where the lumps
of sugar were counted and the coffee-beans kept under lock and key, it
attracted her like wild, incredible romance.

It would have hurt her to behold this unproductive output, no doubt, had
it not been a mere foreigner who lost what her own people
gained,--money, besides, that could never have benefited her, and that
came nearer to benefiting her when spent in that manner than in another.
Clotilde, loyal in service, giving more than good measure, offering all
the pleasant fruits of a visible devotion, could yet not be expected to
have--or, to state it more fairly, was not supposed by Gerald to
have--any real bowels for this outsider, who might for one thing be
drawing from bottomless gold-mines, or, if she were not, would suffer a
ruin she had richly deserved. And might it not in aftertimes profit her,
Clotilde, to have been instrumental to this person and that in obtaining
money from the millionaire? The shops recognized such a title to reward,
and offered it regularly to such private middlemen as herself for a
careful guiding of the dispensing hand, and this without the feeling on
any side that it was the payment of the unjust steward.

Gerald did not in the least despise Clotilde, poor Clotilde, with her
nose like a little white trumpet between her downy pink and white
cheeks, for this business-like outlook and use of her position. It would
have been different if she had been a friend and gentleman.

* * * * *

The portrait did not progress rapidly. Gerald was not hurrying. On
Gerald's lips as he painted there played an ambiguous smile, privately
derisive of his work and the fun he was having.

No problems, no effort, none of those searching doubts of oneself that
produce heart-sickness; nor yet any of those exaltations that cause one
to forget the hour of meals. Curious that it should have been fun all
the same!... His reply to which was that only a very poor observer could
think it curious that the lower man within a man should feel it fun to
be indulged. Fortunately, a natural limit was set to this Capuan period.

He would come from the winter world into the room which the American
kept enervatingly warm, a pernicious practice. One could not deny,
however, that the body relaxed in it with a sense of well-being, after
steeling itself to resist the insidious Italian cold, exuding from damp
pavements and blown on the