you to paint me."

"That's why I want to be quick!" laughed Nick.

"Before she knows it?"

"Shell know it to-morrow. I shall write to her."

The girl faced him again portentously. "I see you're afraid of her." But
she added: "Mention my name; they'll give you the box at the office."

Whether or no Nick were afraid of Mrs. Dallow he still waved away this
bounty, protesting that he would rather take a stall according to his
wont and pay for it. Which led his guest to declare with a sudden
flicker of passion that if he didn't do as she wished she would never
sit to him again.

"Ah then you have me," he had to reply. "Only I _don't_ see why you
should give me so many things."

"What in the world have I given you?"

"Why an idea." And Nick looked at his picture rather ruefully. "I don't
mean to say though that I haven't let it fall and smashed it."

"Ah an idea--that _is_ a great thing for people in our line. But you'll
see me much better from the box and I'll send you Gabriel Nash." She got
into the hansom her host's servant had fetched for her, and as Nick
turned back into his studio after watching her drive away he laughed at
the conception that they were in the same "line."

He did share, in the event, his box at the theatre with Nash, who talked
during the _entr'actes_ not in the least about the performance or the
performer, but about the possible greatness of the art of the
portraitist--its reach, its range, its fascination, the magnificent
examples it had left us in the past: windows open into history, into
psychology, things that were among the most precious possessions of the
human race. He insisted above all on the interest, the importance of
this great peculiarity of it, that unlike most other forms it was a
revelation of two realities, the man whom it was the artist's conscious
effort to reveal and the man--the interpreter--expressed in the very
quality and temper of that effort. It offered a double vision, the
strongest dose of life that art could give, the strongest dose of art
that life could give. Nick Dormer had already become aware of having two
states of mind when listening to this philosopher; one in which he
laughed, doubted, sometimes even reprobated, failed to follow or accept,
and another in which his old friend seemed to take the words out of his
mouth, to utter for him, better and more completely, the very things he
was on the point of saying. Gabriel's saying them at such moments
appear