The bare, ramshackle studio on Washington Square shocked her,--it was so comfortless, so dingy; but the canvases on the walls, set up against the wainscoting, stacked on every available chair, gave her a new and almost appalling impression of his personality, and the peculiar poignant power of him. She could not appraise them, or get any real sense of their quality apart from the astounding revelation of the man behind the work. "They're wonderful!" she gasped, but "You're wonderful" were the words she stifled on her lips. He painted till the light failed him. "It's this diffused glow,--this gentle, faded afternoon light that I want," he said. "I want you to emerge from your background as if you had bloomed out of it that very moment. Oh! I've got you at your hour, you know! The prescient maternal--that's what I want. The conscious moment when a woman becomes aware that she is potentially a mother. Sheila's done that for you. She's brought it out in you. It was ready, it was waiting there before, but now it's come. It's wonderful!" "Yes," Nancy said, "it's--it's come." "It hasn't been done, you know. It's a modern conception, of course; but they all do the thing realized, or incipient. I want to do it _implicit_--that's what I want. I might have searched the whole world over and not found it." "Well, here I am," said Nancy faintly. "Yes, here you are," Collier Pratt responded out of the fervor of his artist's absorption. "It's rather a personal matter to me," Nancy ventured some seconds later. Collier Pratt turned from the canvas he was contemplating, and looked at her, still posed as he had placed her, upright, yet relaxed in the scooped chair that held her without constraining her. "Like a flower in a vase," he said; "to me you're a wonderful creature." "I'm glad you like me," Nancy said, quivering a little. "This is a rather uncommon experience to me, you know, being looked at so impersonally. Now please don't say that I'm being American." "But, good God! I don't look at you impersonally." "Don't you?" Nancy meant her voice to be light, and she was appalled to hear the quaver in it. "You know I don't." He glanced toward a dun-colored curtain evidently concealing shelves and dishes. "Let's have some tea." "I can't stay for tea." Nancy felt her lips begin to quiver childishly, but she could not control their trembling. "Oh! I had better go," she said. Collier Pratt took one step toward her. Then he turned toward the canvas. Nancy read his mind like a flash. "You're afraid you'll disturb the--what you want to paint," she said accusingly. "I am." He smiled his sweet slow smile, then he took her stiff interlaced hands and raised them, still locked together, to his lips where he kissed them gently, one after the other. "Will you forgive me?" he asked, and pushed her gently outside of his studio door. CHAPTER XI BILLY AND CAROLINE