_Bartlett._--"Of course. Otherwise, I couldn't possibly have thought of her while I was at work on a great picture like this. She sketches"-- Bartlett puts his nose almost on the canvas in the process of bestowing a delicate touch--"she sketches about as badly as any woman I ever saw, and _that's_ saying a good deal. But she looks uncommonly well while she's at it. The fact is, Cummings,"--Bartlett retires some feet from the canvas and squints at it,--"this very picture which you approve of so highly is--Miss Wyatt's. _I_ couldn't attempt anything of the size of Ponkwasset! But she allows me to paint at it a little when she's away." Bartlett steals a look of joy at his friend's vexation, and then continues seriously: "I've been having a curious time, Cummings." The other remains silent. "Don't you want to ask me about it?" _Cummings._--"I don't know that I do." _Bartlett._--"Why, my dear old fellow, you're hurt! It _was_ a silly joke, and I honestly ask your pardon." He lays down his brush and palette and leaves the easel. "Cummings, I don't know what to do. I'm in a perfect deuce of a state. I'm hit--awfully hard; and I don't know what to do about it. I wish I had gone at once--the first day. But I had to stay,--I had to stay." He turns and walks away from Cummings, whose eyes follow him in pardon and sympathy. _Cummings._--"Do you really mean it, Bartlett? I didn't dream of such a thing. I thought you were still brooding over that affair with Miss Harlan." _Bartlett._--"Oh, child's-play! A prehistoric illusion! A solar myth! The thing never was." He rejects the obsolete superstition with a wave of his left hand. "I'm in love with this girl, and I feel like a sneak and a brute about it. At the very best it would be preposterous. Who am I, a poor devil of a painter, the particular pet of Poverty, to think of a young lady whose family and position could command her the best? But putting that aside,--putting that insuperable obstacle lightly aside, as a mere trifle,--the thing remains an atrocity. It's enormously indelicate to think of loving a woman who would never have looked twice at me if I hadn't resembled an infernal scoundrel who tried to break her heart; and I've nothing else to commend me. I've the perfect certainty that she doesn't and can't care anything for me in myself; and it grinds me into the dust to realise on what terms she tolerates me. I could carry it off as a joke at first; but when it became serious, I had to look it in the face; and that's what it amounts to, and if you know of any more hopeless and humiliating tangle, _I_ don't." Bartlett, who has approached his friend during this speech, walks away again; and there is an interval of silence. _Cummings_, at last, musingly.--"_You_ in love with Miss Wyatt; I can't imagine it!"