So she told herself, looking anything but delighted with her good fortune. She walked now at a quicker pace, and with a heightened colour. It was an indubitable fact that Minna Hastings was not accustomed to be thwarted or contradicted, and that she did not take kindly to the experience. Presently arriving at the house in which her studio was situated, she walked in under the cavernous entrance, climbed the many stairs to the two rooms in which she was accustomed to work, or dream, or loiter away her time. The first room was of moderate size and by no means luxuriously furnished. It contained, however, an easy-chair and an old comfortable sofa. There was a faded but well-tinted Oriental rug in front of the sofa and coming almost up to a perfectly hideous black stove--a stove which nevertheless was capable, as are not all Roman stoves, of giving out some heat when the wood was fairly burning in it. Minna threw off her hat, mantle and gloves, and then, opening the stove door, began with practised hand to put into it small faggots of twigs, a little torn paper, and some larger pieces of wood. Her beautiful strong hands moved quickly and lithely backwards and forwards, and up and down, in this process. Then she struck a match sharply, applied it at exactly the right spot, shut the door of the stove with a little bang, and rose from her knees, with still the same frown of vexation on her brow. She stood still for a moment, a graceful, gracious figure, clad all in a soft golden brown, and looked absently at the door of the stove, till there came to her ear the welcome hollow sound which told her that the fire was ‘drawing,’ and in a few minutes would be brightly and safely blazing. Then she made a step or two forwards, pushed aside a _portière_ which hung across a doorway without a door, and stepped into the next room. It was her workroom, and was not distinguished by being different from other sculptors’ studios. It was bare, it was sunless, it was spacious, and quite devoid of any effort at adornment. The usual paraphernalia lay about here and there, and the usual casts, copies and gyps of different world-known works. There were one or two things which she had begun and not finished. There were one or two finished things--a bust, a fantastic figure or two: and these finished specimens betrayed a certain strength and rugged power which scarcely accorded with one’s first impression, at any rate, of their creator. She glanced impatiently round, then advanced towards the middle of the room, where stood something of a larger size than any of her other efforts. It was not yet the marble--it was the clay model, enveloped in its wet cloth. She approached it, and laid a hand on the outermost cloth, lifting it, and then paused, before she had discovered to view the work concealed by that drapery. ‘No,’ she said to herself, ‘I will never work at you, nor even look at you while I am in an ill-humour, and that I assuredly am just now.’