manner: "I
daresay it's the best thing for you. You're just going to grind, eh?"

"I see before me an eternity of grinding."

"All alone by yourself in this dull little hole? You _will_ be
conscientious, you _will_ be virtuous."

"Oh my solitude will be mitigated--I shall have models and people."

"What people--what models?" Miriam asked as she arranged her hat before
the glass.

"Well, no one so good as you."

"That's a prospect!" the girl laughed--"for all the good you've got out
of me!"

"You're no judge of that quantity," said Nick, "and even I can't measure
it just yet. Have I been rather a bore and a brute? I can easily believe
it; I haven't talked to you--I haven't amused you as I might. The truth
is that taking people's likenesses is a very absorbing, inhuman
occupation. You can't do much to them besides."

"Yes, it's a cruel honour to pay them."

"Cruel--that's too much," he objected.

"I mean it's one you shouldn't confer on those you like, for when it's
over it's over: it kills your interest in them. After you've finished
them you don't like them any more at all."

"Surely I like _you_," Nick returned, sitting tilted back before his
picture with his hands in his pockets.

"We've done very well: it's something not to have quarrelled"--and she
smiled at him now, seeming more "in" it. "I wouldn't have had you slight
your work--I wouldn't have had you do it badly. But there's no fear of
that for you," she went on. "You're the real thing and the rare bird. I
haven't lived with you this way without seeing that: you're the sincere
artist so much more than I. No, no, don't protest," she added with one
of her sudden, fine transitions to a deeper tone. "You'll do things that
will hand on your name when my screeching is happily over. Only you do
seem to me, I confess, rather high and dry here--I speak from the point
of view of your comfort and of my personal interest in you. You strike
me as kind of lonely, as the Americans say--rather cut off and isolated
in your grandeur. Haven't you any confreres--fellow-artists and people
of that sort? Don't they come near you?"

"I don't know them much," Nick humbly confessed. "I've always been
afraid of them, and how can they take me seriously?"

"Well, _I_'ve got confreres, and sometimes I wish I hadn't! But does
your sister never come near you any more," she asked, "or is it only the
fear of meeting me?"

He was aware of his mother's theory that Biddy was cons