Eugene glanced at her uneasily, a frown between his brows. He knew her like a book. She had always, always from childhood, been a creature of moods. He was perfectly familiar with the various stages of the sirocco, as he had long ago named her outbursts. She would become restless, abstracted, absent, and then she would sit and brood as she was doing now, until finally the sullen and threatening atmosphere would be cleared by a burst of storm, a swift cyclone of anger. Gresham gave the faintest of sighs and an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. This was a situation which he foresaw would require all his tact and ingenuity. "Is the picture gallery all right? Did you find it satisfactory?" asked Hepworth. "Excellent!" Eugene's brow cleared. He spoke with enthusiasm. "Yes, I told Perdita that the lighting there will be perfect. I've about decided to paint her in white. Yes," scrutinizing the indifferent object of the discussion narrowly and yet remotely, as if he were visualizing his finished portrait of her, "white velvet, I think, and rather a blare of jewels. You see I want to bring out the dominating quality of her beauty, harp on it, you know, so I want to present her eclipsing and reducing to their proper places all the splendid accessories with which we can surround her." Her husband nodded approvingly. "What do you think, Dita?" "Oh, by all means," she roused herself to answer, but making no effort to conceal the irony of her tones. "Let Eugene give me all the distinction and grace he is noted for bestowing on, you observe I do not say perceiving in, his clients, or patients, or patrons, whatever he may call them. Make the stones of my tiara and necklace even bigger and whiter and more sparkling than they are, Eugene. Or better still, I'll wear my diamond collar and my string of rubies and my rope of sapphires, all shouting hurrah at once, three cheers for the red, white and blue! Make me all glittery, Eugene, throw my sables over my shoulders." "By Jove!" cried Gresham, interrupting her, a white flash of enthusiasm across his face, "you may not dream it, Dita, but that's it exactly. You've hit it." "Yes," she went on satirically, "and present me in the middle of all this splendor, overcome by the 'burden of an honor into which I was not born.'" "But you were born to it," interposed her husband quickly, "no one more so." "Perhaps," she sighed a little, her eyes and voice grew softer, "but at a time when the outward manifestation had vanished."