of the smaller members of the household. Winifred, who had a dainty talent for the painting of still life, supported herself, living at home and paying her share of the household expenses. She was a little, gentle creature, with dark hair, and with a rich colour showing beneath a brown cheek. Her deep brown eyes had a doglike trustfulness in them, and a steadfastness withal such as makes the heroine. A girl of few moods, few caprices. Her work was always beautifully, conscientiously finished. She always loved it, always found in it the same quiet charm. There was no element of passion in it to set jarring the strings of futile endeavour. A fine sense of colour and gradation and subtle curve, a supreme delicacy of touch—that was her sole artistic stock in trade, and she never sought to stray beyond the limits imposed. She had had a little picture accepted at the Academy, hung in a far, far corner—a bunch of Maréchal Niel roses, full-blown, in a Venetian glass vase of exquisitely veined transparencies—a perfect little picture, sweet and pure, like herself.
It was a cold March day. The sun shone cheerfully through the drawn white blinds of the studio skylight, but an east wind blowing outside came in through the cracks and defied the blaze of the fire in the stove.
“You are quite blue with cold,” said Winifred, laying down mahl-stick and palette. “Here, put on this wrap. Why don't you take more care of yourself?”
“I never thought of it,” said Clytie, shivering a little and accepting contentedly the wrap and a caress. “I was sketching out quite a history of that boy who has just left.”
Winifred drew a stool to Clytie's chair near the fire and took up her position upon it—a favourite one with her, as she could have both the moral solace of sitting at Clytie's feet, and the physical comfort of resting her head in Clytie's lap.
“I hope he won't bring all kinds of horrible people into the house—burglars, you know, like Oliver Twist,” she added vaguely.
“I suppose it is rather rash picking up a model out of the streets. But he is just the boy I wanted to give character to the group. I was going to paint in one out of my own head.”
“I don't know how you get all those street types out of your head, Clytie. I wish I could do it.”
“I would like to see you try, you silly child,” said Clytie, laughing. “Your street arabs would look like stray Cupids hastily huddled up in old clothes by a shocked and modest policeman!”
“I did not mean that; you know I didn't. What I meant was—I wish I could paint without models. I don't think I could paint a common flat leaf without having it before me. As for painting that”—and she pointed to a basket standing by her easel, overflowing with anemones, snowdrops, and violets obtained that morning by Mr. Gurkins from Covent Garden—“without a copy, I might just as soon think of flying.”
“You are an artist, Winnie, and love your art for its own sake. I am not quite so sure that I do, now. To have to finish all the thousand little convolutions of those bells would drive me raving mad. I should like to have a ghost as sculptors do, only mine would do the finishing and put in all the nuisance of detail. That's why I can get on without models. It saves time. I can bring home a face with me from the streets, and I can paint it in rapidly, and then I am done. I suppose I oughtn't to be, but Burrowes seems satisfied. He says he has got quite a 'line' in my pictures—the correct ones—and is thinking of raising the price. I am sure that man has been a linen-draper.”
“If you could remember the boy's face why do you bring him here?” asked Winifred. “I only want to know why you want him so particularly, dear,” she added, raising her chin and looking upwards at Clytie.
The boy had been ragged and uncared-for, not exactly a street urchin, but on a vague borderland of respectability, between the newspaper arab and the errand boy.—a hybrid with the vices of many strains.
“Do you really want to know, Winnie?” said Clytie. “Perhaps you'll be shocked. However, you'll have to know sooner or later: I am going to make a picture of him on my own account, just a little bit more fantastic than he is, and call him a—an—oh, dear! what shall I call him?”
“An elf?”
“Good gracious, no. What have I to do with elves and fairies and that sort of thing? He is the son of Cophetua—supposing the king had not married the beggar maid.”
“Then why not the son of any other king?”
“Why not, indeed?” said Clytie drily. “Or of any other beggar maid?”
“Oh!” said Winifred, looking into the fire.
And then after a pause:
“What makes you think that?”
“Did you see his mother? I did. Such a stupid-looking, red-faced woman. I think she said she was a charwoman by profession. There are generations of drudgery in her face, whereas in Jack's there is vigour and intelligence—something so different; he must have some better strain of blood in him than she and a husband of her class can have given him. Don't you think so, dear?”
“He's a very pretty boy,” replied Winifred, “but, oh, he is so dirty and”—with a shudder—“so animal.”
“Well, he fascinates me,” said Clytie meditatively. “I am going to paint one of my wildest pictures—all for my own self—and a bit for you if you like, Winnie.” Winnie accepted this tribute of affection with a little flush of pleasure, although Clytie's “own” pictures seldom gave her unqualified æsthetic delight, and turned her face towards Clytie, who laughed in her frank way.
“Don't look at me with those great eyes of yours, child! You make me angry for you. They are just the sort of eyes that make women miserable. You must not trust in people like that, believe me.”
“I trust them when they are good like you, dear.”
“Oh, but you mustn't. Don't you know I am the wickedest girl going—always thinking of the most dreadful things? Look at the wall. How can you love anybody that can do these silly things?”
She pointed to a series of grotesque charcoal caricatures on the studio wall. She had been dissatisfied a day or two back with a picture she had been engaged on for a month, and in a fit of wilfulness had daubed it out and then proceeded to make a cruel, fantastic travesty of it on the wall.
“You wanted your tea, dear, just as you do now,” replied Winifred.
This tea hour was Winifred's great delight. At home, on account of the children, they had to sit round the dining table and butter their own thick slices of bread and drink out of substantial breakfast cups. In the studio the girls had provided a dainty little afternoon tea equipage, and Mrs. Gurkins always cut thin bread and butter from a fancy loaf. Generally it was Winifred who poured out the tea, but to-day Clytie busied herself with the cups, thus making some slight amends, perhaps, for having shocked Winifred. Women are full of these odd feminine impulses, and other women understand them. Men don't.
They sat talking, as they usually did, over their tea, and long afterwards, until it was time for Winifred to go home. As they were taking leave of each other on the landing a man sprang up the stairs, checked himself, and raised a slouch hat as he passed them and vanished up the next flight. He was a fresh-faced man, with a brown and tawny beard; tawny ends, too, to his moustaches; bright gray eyes flashing humourously as he passed the girls. His dress was careless, loose and unfashionable, yet it was marked with a certain individuality.
“Who is that?” Winifred whispered when the last foot of the ascending figure had disappeared.
“That's another protest,” said Clytie—“a better one. He has the courage of his convictions.”
“What do you mean, Clytie?”
“Well, can't you recognise a protest when you see one?”
“Oh, Clytie, don't tease and puzzle me,” cried Winifred, giving her friend's arm a little shake. “Do you know him?”
“Of course not.