“Just five minutes more. There’s something I don’t want to miss about that light. I can’t ever get you into the same position twice. You’re changeable enough--physically!” she concluded. He strolled over to the portrait when she had released him and criticized it outrageously. The face was all wrong, the colour of the hair absurd, the brow too handsome. It was a good picture perhaps, but a poor portrait. Her sketches of him were better. She had a nice loose line in sketching and didn’t flatter so much. Women ought never to paint men, at least never their sweethearts. They weren’t honest enough. They were too romantic. But this was all delivered in the utmost good nature and she did not resent it. She thought he was quite a good critic of painting. He liked things of very crude strength, directness. Her work, she herself was inclined to admit, indulged in glamour--it was the hardest thing to avoid. But she hoped that in ten or twenty years she would do something good; that was time enough. As a matter of fact, Miles Harlindew thought his wife’s work remarkably fine and had often said so. Then, discovering she was so modest about it that praise was downright displeasing to her, he adopted the bantering tone. He catered to her modesty by giving her all the severe criticism he dared to. And on the whole it resulted in a better understanding. Standing in the doorway, he watched her with some impatience, while she put on a hat, powdered her nose, dabbed at her nails and stood in front of the mirror gazing at herself in satisfied animation. She liked to make him wait. Then they slipped down the narrow carpeted stairs and into the brilliant afternoon, breathless and laughing. It was not surprising that people looked twice at the pair. She wondered if there were any two lovers who enjoyed their holidays together as much as they. There were so many things to do and it needed so little to make them memorable. A walk through Italian streets, flooded with little bodies and loud with cries, to some unknown restaurant; or up the Avenue in the dusk to the Park; or a long ride in front of the bus--whatever met their eyes on these jaunts was fresh and new though they had seen it a hundred times before. There was no place for a honeymoon like New York: it meant that the honeymoon never ended. Marriage had hardly changed an outward detail of their lives. She had refused to give up her job, which he somehow expected she could do. Perhaps she could paint and try to sell her work. It appeared to him so much more fitting. But Moira did not wish to sell her paintings, even if she had thought them worth any money. All that could wait. Wasn’t his work waiting too? Poor boy! How could any one expect him to write with his time all taken up? “But,” he objected, “I may have to take care of more than you one of these days. Hadn’t I better get used to it?” “Nonsense,” she replied. “That’s all the more reason why I should be earning now.”