her grandmother's pernicious book.
Yet the club was to meet with her, the honorable secretary, and it had
no topic to whet its teeth upon. In her dilemma, she put on her hat and
walked over to inquire of Rose when her father was to return. MacLeod's
bubbling kindliness seemed to her so generous that she made no doubt he
would talk to them for an hour, or even allow her to give him a
reception.

Rose was in the garden, as usual, in the long chair, and Peter was
painting. Ostensibly he was painting her, but the mood escaped him and
he was blurring in a background. Electra remembered, as she went up the
path, that still nothing had been said to her about Peter's painting. He
might have been any sort of young 'prentice for all she heard about his
work; and here it was beginning incidentally, like an idle task, with no
reference to her. She had thought painting was something to be carried
on gravely, when one had reached Peter's eminence. There ought to be
talk of theories and emotions inspired by pictures in the inception, not
merely this prosaic business of sitting down to work and characterizing
beauties with a flippant jargon of words misused. "Very nice,"
"stunning"--that was what she had heard Peter say even of sunsets that
ought to have moved him to the skies. He had a delicate-fingered way of
touching everything, as if the creative process were a little one, of
small simplicities: not as if art were long.

When she appeared that morning, behind the hollyhocks, Rose was about to
spring up, and Peter did stand, expectant, with his charming smile.
Electra at once made proper disclaimers, and insisted that the sitter's
pose should not be broken and that it would be an immense entertainment
to see the work go on. Peter brought a chair out of the arbor, and she
sat down, erect and handsome, while Rose sank back into her
unconstrained reclining. Rose wore the simplest dress, and her slender
arms were bare. There were about her the signs of tasks abandoned, even
of pleasures dropped and not remembered--the book half closed upon her
finger, the rose and fan. Her great hat with its long feather lay beside
her on the ground, and Electra, justly appraising its picturesqueness
and value, thought, with brief distaste, that it looked as if it might
belong to an actress. She asked her question at once and Rose answered.
No, her father would not be here in time for the important meeting. She
had no doubt he would indeed have said mo