"Oh, but I wanted to see you just as you are every day. It is so home-like--and what a delightful smell of paint! But do you always keep your boots above the canopy? They spoil the effect somehow." "I tossed them up there to get rid of them," explained Nevins. "But tell me about yourself. You look as if you had just slid out of the lap of luxury." "Without rumpling her gown," added Ardly. "I was about to observe that she seemed in prosperous circumstances," remarked Mr. Paul. "Oh, I am," responded Mariana. "Stupidly prosperous. But let me look at the paintings first, then I'll talk of myself. What is on the big easel, Mr. Nevins?" "That's a portrait," said Nevins, drawing the curtain aside and revealing a lady in black. "I am only a photographer in oils. I am painting everybody's portrait." "That means success, doesn't it? And success means money, and money means so many things. Yes, that's good. I like it." Nevins smiled, enraptured. "You were the beginning," he said. "It was the painting of you and--and the blue wrapper that did it. It gave me such a push uphill that I haven't stood still since." The wistfulness beneath the surface in Mariana's eyes deepened suddenly. Her manner grew nervous. "Oh yes," she said, turning away. "I remember." Mr. Paul, who had watched her gloomily, with traces of disapprobation in his gaze, took his leave with a stilted good-bye, and Mariana threw herself upon the divan, while Ardly and Nevins seated themselves on footstools at her feet and looked into her eyes. "I want to hear all--all," she said. "Are you happy?" "Are you?" asked Ardly. She shook her head impatiently. "I? Oh yes," she answered. "I have clothes, and a carriage, and even a few jewels." She slipped the long glove from her hand, which came soft and white from its imprisonment, with the indentation of the buttons on the supple wrist. She held up her fingers, where a blaze of diamonds ran. Then she smiled. "But I never sang with Alvary," she added. "Where is the voice?" "It is dead," she replied; "but it was only a skeleton when it lived. I learned that afterwards. I had the artistic temperament without the art." Nevins and Ardly, watching the mobility of her face, saw the old half-disdainful weariness steal back. "So you have learned that," said Nevins. "It is the greater wisdom--to learn what one has not." "I don't idealize any longer," answered Mariana, playing with the glove in her lap. "I have lopped off an ideal every hour since I saw you." "Sensible woman," returned Ardly. "We don't lop off our ideals--we distort them. Life is a continuous adjustment of the things that should be to the things that are." "And middle-age shows the adjustment to be a misfit," added Nevins, his boyish face growing almost sad. "We grow tired of burnishing up the facts of life, and we leave the tarnish to mix with the triple-plate." "Are you middle-aged?" asked Mariana. "Not since you entered."