Part 3 (1/2)

Mrs. Venables drew back; her surprise startled Betty. It was, surely, a very usual and natural request.

'Of course,' Mrs. Venables said gently, after a moment. 'I will give it to you now.... I am so sorry....'

'Thank you tremendously.'

Betty put the notes in her purse. Mrs. Venables became aware that the Crevequer smile, with the single dimple, was rather engaging. Then Tommy came up with Venables, and said it was time to go away.

Miss Varley, as she said good-bye, referred to Betty's statement that she sometimes posed.

'Will you for me? I am painting a picture, and I should be very grateful if you would.'

The unsmiling directness of the tone made the request very much a matter of business. Betty said she would.

'Warren and Prudence are always painting,' Miranda explained mournfully.

'Their pictures are rotten, I think; I hate them.'

The Crevequers went.

'Very picturesque; very striking; very sad,' Mrs. Venables observed.

'Very obvious,' Warren commented. 'I would have betted a guinea that Crevequer would borrow from me; he did. I call that so obvious as to be tiresome.'

To his cousin, a little later, he remarked:

'You're standing on a quite false pedestal of superiority, you know.

Because you're going to paint her yourself. Where's the difference?'

'Ah, well, there is some. To me she's frankly copy, you see; I shall pretend nothing else; I shan't call it making friends--don't you see?

There's where it comes in.'

'All the same, you'll be doing what you repudiate; you'll be making use for your own ends of what you wouldn't otherwise have anything to do with. You're in a false position; you can't escape that by sophistries.'

'If I am, I shall have to be more than ever careful not to make it falser by throwing veils over it,' said Prudence Varley consideringly.

She had the air of a person of a very delicate sense of justice--delicate almost to exaggeration. One detected it in her farsighted grey eyes, with the twinkle that lurked just within call.

Warren chuckled.

'Poor model! You needn't make it so hard as all that for her; let her have a veil or two--it's so much more comfortable.'

Prudence shook her head with decision.

'It wouldn't be fair; it would be ugly.'

Warren smiled again--at her characteristic habit of arriving, with great deliberation, at her own position in a matter, and remaining in it unshaken. If to her perception an immense difference stretched between the frankness of taking copy as such, and ending there, and the course of tact and sympathy and 'achievement of intimacy' which his mother pursued, no accusations of sophistry or overniceness would bridge that gulf to her.

'Well,' Venables said, half defensively, 'Mother really is interested, you know--very much so.'