Dorothy Sheridan had come back from her fishing village, and a little trip abroad to boot, and she and the Fays were dining in a little restaurant to which she had taken them—not very far from their studio, a little Italian place frequented by artists, where the food was good and the prices low. The men one saw there wore soft collars, like Felix’s own, sometimes turned up to flare about the chin, sometimes open at the neck; one of the girls at the tables wore a Russian smock, like Dorothy Sheridan, and all of them seemed, like her, comfortably uncorseted. They all seemed to know each other, and each new person who came greeted the whole roomful. It was a friendly place. Felix was rather amused at having his afternoons asked for and given away without his being consulted. But he was flattered by the invitation. He had never been painted, and he considered it a distinction. “It will be a bore,” Dorothy warned him. “You’ll get awfully tired of it before I’m through. But I’ll do you in half a dozen sittings, I promise you, or give it up. Give him a cup of coffee, before he comes. I don’t talk to my subjects, and they are likely to fall asleep!” They had been to Dorothy Sheridan’s studio that afternoon, and looked at her paintings and sketches. The paintings were, with one or two exceptions, in a vivid, splashing style that Felix liked. “I’ve changed my style since going to Paris,” she said. “These things are what they call over there Post-Impressionist. I’ll do you in my best Cezanne-Matisse manner, Felix, with some variations all my own. You won’t know yourself!” Rose-Ann had been most impressed by some of Dorothy’s old sketches, particularly a series of lovely nudes done in pencil with a hard, vibrant line. Dorothy picked one of them out and gave it to Rose-Ann. “Here’s one that looks like you,” she said, appraising Rose-Ann’s figure with a judicious eye. “You can use it for a book-plate if you like.” It was like Rose-Ann, Felix thought, when she pinned it on the wall that night—it had the same firm and delicate contours, the same sweet livingness of a body that is made for movement, for action, for intense and poignant use. The figure in the drawing was poised in the hesitant instant before flight, with head turned to look backward, and the whole body ready at the next moment either to relapse again into reassured repose or to put all its force into some wild dash for freedom. And somehow that too reminded him of Rose-Ann—of Rose-Ann’s soul. Rose-Ann was looking at the picture with eyes in which some purpose fulminated darkly. “What are you thinking?” he asked. “That I shall never wear corsets again! It’s really absurd, isn’t it? To imprison one’s body in such a thing as that.... I’m going to burn mine up—now!” And presently, in her chemise and stockings, she solemnly knelt before the Franklin stove and laid the offending article upon the live coals. “The last of my conventions!” she said, as if to herself.