s aerial monologues on art even
when his pose seemed to her superficial and almost silly, for
occasionally he said something which was not only clever in sound, but
which, to her thinking, rang true. But on the personal side he was
becoming unpleasantly aggressive. She regarded him with admittedly
mixed feelings, and she was not at all sure just how well she liked
him, but she felt quite certain that she did not wish to have him ask
her to marry him.

When they came to the door of her apartment in Deerfield Street, where
she lived with her mother, he held her hand perceptibly longer than was
necessary in saying farewell.

"You will come to the studio Thursday morning at eleven?" he said
tenderly.

"Yes, certainly," Miss Maitland answered in a matter-of-fact tone.

He hesitated.

"I never wanted to do anything well so much as I want to do your
portrait well. I want to make your portrait by far the finest thing
that I have ever done--or that I ever shall do," he said. "Truly
beautiful--and truly you."

"That is extremely good of you," replied the girl in a perfectly level
voice, manifesting no more emotion than she would have displayed had he
dramatically announced that he purposed executing her likeness on
canvas and that he intended to use oil paints of various colors.
"Good-by," she added, and the door closed behind the artist.

Charles Wilkinson, returning from the Hurds' to his boarding house,
opened the front door with his latch key and stepped into the dingy
hall. On a small table beside the hatrack lay the boarders' mail. He
picked out three envelopes addressed to him, walked upstairs, and
entered his room. Seating himself in the only comfortable chair the
apartment afforded, he gloomily regarded the three missives.

The first bore on its upper left-hand corner the mark of his tailor, a
chronic creditor, once patient, then consecutively surprised, annoyed,
amazed, and of late showing signs of extreme exasperation accompanied
by threats; at the end of the gamut the contents of this would be more
vivacious reading than merely the monotonous and colorless repetition
of an account rendered. The second was from his dentist, a man spurred
to fury, whose extraction of two wisdom teeth had been of trifling
difficulty in comparison with the task of extracting from his patient
the amount named in his bill, and who had found in Wilkinson's mouth no
cavity comparable in gravity with that apparently existing