For myself, I don’t blame Oliver. _In the spring_—and after all, they had been discussing love. Besides, as he said to her some hectic moments later when, in sheer breathlessness, she allowed him to speak, where was the harm? Most girls liked that sort of thing. He felt ill-used. She was old enough to play the game ... to observe the rules that every girl, every human being, ought to know.... She was a little fool ... nothing in her after all ... nothing whatever.... For Laura, after one paralysed, open-mouthed moment, had risen in her wrath (literally risen—she sent the easels flying) and overwhelmed him: and while she told him, with impassioned accuracy, what she thought of him, and Oliver rose from the wreck to answer, for characteristically his first concern had been his canvas, she scrubbed her outraged cheek with her pocket-handkerchief; or it may have been her paint-rag, for there was little, in those days, to choose between them. And that, curiously, infuriated Oliver. Mere angry words he was accustomed to discount, but all the irresistible apologies he had premeditated, all his assumption of _savoir-faire_, melted before the spectacle of that all too genuine disgust. There remained the raw juvenile, wanting to say: “Yah! suppose you think that’s funny!” like a small boy quarrelling with his sister. What he said, however, and with intense dignity, was— “You’re only making yourself streaky. That rag’s thick with cadmium.” Then he exploded. “Look here, Laura, I’m not a disease!” “I don’t care what you are,” she blazed. “I don’t want to discuss it. I don’t want to speak to you at all. If you’re so eaten up with conceit that I can’t be nice to you——Oh, you don’t suppose,” she adjured him, “that I should ever have bothered to be nice to you—to _you_—except to please the Clouds? I don’t like you. I never did like you. I don’t want to like you. Only you’re Justin’s friend, so I have to be polite to you.” “I suppose that’s what you call it?” he enquired bitterly: and, for an instant, she stared at him blankly, all her dignity endangered by a spasm of untimely mirth. She controlled it in a flash, and hardening from hot anger into cold, sat down again on her stool, picked up her scattered chalks and ignored him for a full quarter of an hour. But if there had been, at that critical moment, a twinkle in Oliver’s eye, I believe that she might have been jockeyed into forgiveness. It was always fatally easy to make Laura laugh.