"I shall have to depend a great deal on your judgment in that matter," he went on. "You won't mind it, I hope?" "Not if you won't mind it's not being worth anything." "It will be worth everything!" "Or if you won't care for my not giving it, sometimes." "I don't understand." "Well, I shouldn't want to seem to talk her over." "Oh, no! You _don't_ think I expected you to do that? It was merely the right point of view I wanted to get." "I don't know as I object to that," said Cornelia. The car which she wished to take came by, and he stopped it and handed her aboard. She thought he might decide to come with her, but he bowed his good-night, and she saw him walking on down town as she passed him. At the end of a fortnight Ludlow had failed to get his picture of Charmian; at the end of a month he began with a new pose and a fresh theory. That quality of hers which he hoped to surprise with Cornelia's help, and which was to give verity and value to his portrait, when once he expressed it there, escaped him still. She was capable of perfect poses, but they were mere flashes of attitude. Then the antique mystery lurking in her face went out of it, and she became _fin de siecle_ and romantic, and young ladyish, and uninteresting to Ludlow. She made tea every afternoon when they finished, and sometimes the talk they began with before they began work prolonged itself till the time for the tea had come. On the days when Mr. Plaisdell dropped in for a cup, the talk took such a range that the early dark fell before it ended, and then Cornelia had to stay for dinner and to be sent home in Mrs. Maybough's coupe. She had never supposed there was anything like it in all the world. Money, and, in a certain measure, the things that money could buy, were imaginable in Pymantoning; but joys so fine, so simple as these, were what she could not have forecast from any ground of experience or knowledge. She tried to give her mother a notion of what they said and did; but she told her frankly she never could understand. Mrs. Saunders, in fact, could not see why it was so exciting; she read Cornelia's letters to Mrs. Burton, who said she could see, and she told Mrs. Saunders that, she would like it as much as Cornelia did, if she were in her place; that she was a kind of Bohemian herself.