Here was all his student-litter. Here were the good photographs of good pictures, bought second-hand; the bad copies of good pictures, made by Cartaret himself during long mornings in the Louvre, where impudent tourists, staring at his work, jolted his elbow and craned their necks beside his cheek; there were the plaster-casts on brackets--casts of antiques more mutilated than the antiques themselves; and here, too, were the rows of lost endeavors in the shape of discarded canvases banked on the floor along the walls and sometimes jutting far out into the room. Two or three chairs were scattered about, one with a broken leg--he remembered the party at which it was broken; across from the fire-place was Cartaret's bed that a tarnished Oriental cover (made in Lyons) converted by day into a divan; and close beside the rear window, flanked by the table on which he mixed his colors, stood, almost at the elbow of this imperious intruder, Cartaret's own easel with a virgin canvas in position, waiting to receive the successor to that picture which he had sold for a song a few hours ago. What was he doing here, indeed! He liked that. And she was still at it: "How dare you think so?" she persisted. The slight pauses between her words lent them more weight than, even in his ears, they otherwise would have possessed. She came a step nearer, and Cartaret saw that she was breathing quickly and that the bit of lace above her heart rose and fell irregularly. "How dare you?" she repeated. She was close enough now for him to decide that she was quite the most striking girl he had ever seen. Her figure, without a touch of exaggeration, was full and yet lithe: it moved with the grace of the athlete. Her skin was rosy and white--the rose of health and the clear cream of sane living. It was, however, her manner that had led Cartaret first to doubt his own senses, and then to doubt hers. This girl spoke like a queen resenting a next-to-impossible familiarity. He had half a mind to leave the place and allow her to discover her own mistake, the nature of which--his room ran the length of the old house and half its width, being separated from a similar room by only a dark and draughty hallway--now suddenly revealed itself to him. He seriously considered leaving her alone to the advent of her humiliation. Then he looked at her again. Her hair, in sharp contrast to the tint of her face, was a shining blue-black; though her features were almost classical in their regularity, her mouth was generous and sensitive, and, under even black brows and through long, curling lashes, her eyes shone frank and blue. Cartaret decided to remain. "You are an artist?" he inquired. "Leave this room!" She stamped a little foot. "Leave this room instantly!" Cartaret stooped to one of the canvases that were piled against the wall nearest him. He turned its face to her. "And this is some of your work?" he asked.