“So why should I?” she repeated gaily. He stood silent, imprisoned; and she went on, throwing her head back a little, and letting her gaze filter down on him through her rich lowered lashes: “But I know you’ll agree with me that it’s only fair. After all, Donald has set you the example. He’s given you something awfully valuable in return for the favour you’re going to do him—the immense favour. Poor darling—there never was anybody as generous as Donald! Don’t be alarmed; I’m not going to ask you to give me a present on _that_ scale.” She drew herself up and threw back her lids, as if challenging him. “You’d have difficulty in finding one—anybody would!” French was still speechless, bewildered, not daring to think ahead, and all the while confusedly aware that his misery was feeding some obscure springs of amusement in her. “In return for the equally immense favour I’m going to do you—coming back to Paris in March, and giving you a whole week—what are you going to give _me_? Have you ever thought about _that_?” she flung out at him; and then, before he could answer: “Oh, don’t look so miserable—don’t rack your brains over it! I told you I wasn’t grasping—I’m not going to ask for anything unattainable. Only, you see—” she paused, her face grown suddenly tender and young again—“you see, Donald wants so dreadfully to have a portrait of me, one for his very own, by a painter he really admires; a _likeness_, simply, you see, not one of those wild things poor Horace used to do of me—and what I want is to beg and implore you to ask Jolyesse if he’ll do me. I can’t ask him myself: Horace despised his things, and was always ridiculing him, and Jolyesse knew it. It’s all very well—but, as I used to tell Horace, success does mean something after all, doesn’t it? And no one has been more of a success than Jolyesse—I hear his prices have doubled again. Well, that’s a proof, in a way ... what’s the use of denying it? Only it makes it more difficult for poor me, who can’t afford him, even if I dared to ask!” She wrinkled her perfect brows in mock distress. “But if _you_ would—an old friend like you—if you’d ask it as a personal favour, and make him see that for the widow of a colleague he ought to make a reduction in his price—really a _big_ reduction!—I’m sure he’d do it. After all, it’s not my fault if my husband didn’t like his pictures. And I should be so grateful to you, and so would Donald.” She dropped French’s arm and held out both her shining hands to him. “You _will_—you really will? Oh, you dear good man, you!” He had slipped his hands out of hers, but she caught him again, this time not menacingly but exuberantly. “If you could arrange it for when I’m here in March, that would be simply perfect, wouldn’t it? You can, you think? Oh, bless you! And mind, he’s got to make it a full-length!” she called after him joyfully across the threshold. VELVET EAR-PADS I