It was then that this Artist made a serious error of judgment. He would have done much more wisely to allow this stupid maid-of-all-work to go away and attend to some of it in the kitchen, while he looked after his own. Instead of doing so, he, being seriously alarmed at the possible domestic consequences of his very imperfectly thought out joke--for he knew his wife accounted the finding of a new handmaid life's greatest calamity--must needs make an ill-advised attempt to calm the troubled waters on the same line that he would have adopted, at any rate in his Bohemian days, with Miss de Lancey or Miss Montmorency--these names are chosen at random--whose professional beauty as models did not prevent their suffering, now and again, from tantrums. And cajolery, of the class otherwise known as blarney, might have smoothed over the incident, and the whole thing have been forgotten, if bad luck had not, just at this moment, brought back to the Studio the mistress of the house, who had only been attracted by a noise in the street to look out at a front-window. She, coming unheard within hearing, not only was aware of interchanges of unusual amiability between Reginald and that horrible girl Sairah, but was just in time to hear the latter say, "You keep your 'ands off of me now, Mr. Aching!" without any apparent intention of being taken at her word. And, further, that the odious minx brazened it out, leaving the room as if nothing had happened, before the gentleman's offended wife could find words to express her indignation. At least, so this lady told her Aunt Priscilla that evening, in an interview from which we have just borrowed some telling phrases. As for her profligate husband, it came out in the same interview that he looked "sheepish to a degree, and well he might." He had tried to cook up a sort of explanation--"oh yes! a _sort_,"--which was no doubt an attempt on the misguided man's part to tell the truth. But we have seen that he was the last person to succeed in such an enterprise; and, indeed, self-exculpation is tough work, even for the guiltless. Fancy the fingers of reproachful virtue directed at you from all points of the compass. And suppose, to make matters worse, you had committed something--not a crime, you would never do that; but something or other of a committable nature--what on earth could you do but look sheepish to some degree or other? Unless, indeed, you were a minx, and could brazen it out, like that gurl.