ated in self-respect; since the courage
of renouncing the forum for the studio hovered before him as greater
than the courage of marrying an actress whom one was in love with: the
reward was in the latter case so much more immediate. Peter at any rate
asked Biddy what Nick had done with his portrait of Miriam. He hadn't
seen it anywhere in rummaging about the room.

"I think it's here somewhere, but I don't know," she replied, getting up
to look vaguely round her.

"Haven't you seen it? Hasn't he shown it to you?"

She rested her eyes on him strangely a moment, then turned them away
with a mechanical air of still searching. "I think it's in the room, put
away with its face to the wall."

"One of those dozen canvases with their backs to us?"

"One of those perhaps."

"Haven't you tried to see?"

"I haven't touched them"--and Biddy had a colour.

"Hasn't Nick had it out to show you?"

"He says it's in too bad a state--it isn't finished--it won't do."

"And haven't you had the curiosity to turn it round for yourself?"

The embarrassed look in her face deepened under his insistence and it
seemed to him that her eyes pleaded with him a moment almost to tears.
"I've had an idea he wouldn't like it."

Her visitor's own desire, however, had become too sharp for easy
forbearance. He laid his hand on two or three canvases which proved, as
he extricated them, to be either blank or covered with rudimentary
forms. "Dear Biddy, have you such intense delicacy?" he asked, pulling
out something else.

The inquiry was meant in familiar kindness, for Peter was struck even to
admiration with her having a sense of honour that all girls haven't. She
must in this particular case have longed for a sight of Nick's work--the
work that had brought about such a crisis in his life. But she had
passed hours in his studio alone without permitting herself a stolen
peep; she was capable of that if she believed it would please him. Peter
liked a charming girl's being capable of that--he had known charming
girls who wouldn't in the least have been--and his question was really a
form of homage. Biddy, however, apparently discovered some light mockery
in it, and she broke out incongruously:

"I haven't wanted so much to see it! I don't care for her so much as
that!"

"So much as what?" He couldn't but wonder.

"I don't care for his actress--for that vulgar creature. I don't like
her!" said Biddy almost startlingly.

Peter stared. "I t