"Not the shadow of one. Please trust me, Mrs. Hawthorne. This is to be a portrait entirely satisfactory as well as entirely resembling. It is like you to desire to be painted with your plumes and pearls and roses, and they are very becoming. I shall put them in with pleasure. I know you do not believe I can paint a portrait to suit you. Very well. Grant me the favor of a chance to try. We shall see." It was true that she did not believe it, but she was so willing to hope. One of the upstairs rooms at the back was chosen for the sittings because the light through its windows was the least variable. The necessary artist's baggage was brought over from Gerald's, and the work began. Charcoal in hand, he regarded Mrs. Hawthorne quietly and lengthily through half-closed eyes. "You have not one good feature," he said, as if thinking aloud. "Oh!"--she started out of the pose they had after much experimenting decided upon--"oh! is that the way you're going to pay me for keeping still on a chair by the hour?" "You have no eyebrows to speak of." "What do you mean? Yes, I have, too; lots of them; lovely ones. Only they don't show up. They're fair, to match my hair." "You are undershot." "What's that?" "Your lower jaw closes outside of your upper." "Oh, but so little! Just enough to take the curse off an otherwise too perfect beauty." As she curled up the corners of her mouth in an affected smirk, he quickly shifted his glance, with a horrible suspicion that she was crossing her eyes. As she had pronounced the word perfect "_parfect_," he presumed that she was making herself look, for the remainder, like Antonia. It was her latest vaudeville turn, imitating Antonia. He was careful not to look again in her direction until she had stopped doing what annoyed him furiously. He could not hope to make her understand to what point the debasing of beauty to brutal comic uses wounded him. "Faultless features," he went on after a time, in commentary on his earlier remark, "do not by any means always make a beautiful face," politely leading her to suppose he meant that to be without them was no great misfortune. Estelle came into the room for company. She brought her sewing, one of those elegant pieces of handiwork that give to idleness a good conscience. Gerald felt her delicately try to get acquainted with him. She was not as altogether void of intellectual curiosity as her friend. She would seem to care about discovering further what sort of man he was mentally, what his ideas were on a variety of subjects. Also, but even more delicately, to interest him, just a little bit, in her own self and ideas. He was grateful to her, and did what he could to show himself responsive. With the portrait began the period of a less perfunctory relation between them. They had talks sometimes that Aurora declared, without trace of envy, were 'way above her head.