"I--don't--want to--" she began; but he went away into the hall, rang, and presently she heard the ascending clatter of a dumb-waiter. From it he took the luncheon card and returned to where she was sitting at a rococo table. She blushed as he laid the card before her, and would have nothing to do with it. The result was that he did the ordering, sent the dumb-waiter down with his scribbled memorandum, and came wandering back with long, cool glances at his canvas and the work he had done on it. "I mean to make a stunning thing of it," he remarked, eying the huge chassis critically. "All this--deviltry--whatever it is inside of me--must come out somehow. And that canvas is the place for it." He laughed and sat down opposite her: "Man is born to folly, Miss West--born full of it. I get rid of mine on canvas. It's a safer outlet for original sin than some other ways." She lay back in her antique gilded chair, hands extended along the arms, looking at him with a smile that was still shy. "My idea of you--of an artist--was so different," she said. "There are all kinds, mostly the seriously inspired and humourless variety who makes a mystic religion of a very respectable profession. This world is full of pale, enraptured artists; full of muscular, thumb-smearing artists; full of dreamy weavers of visions, usually deficient in spinal process; full of unwashed little inverts to whom the world really resembles a kaleidoscope full of things that wiggle--" They began to laugh, he with a singular delight in her comprehension of his idle, irresponsible chatter, she from sheer pleasure in listening and looking at this man who was so different from anybody she had ever known--and, thank God!--so young. And when the bell rang and the clatter announced the advent of luncheon, she settled in her chair with a little shiver of happiness, blushing at her capacity for it, and at her acquiescence in the strangest conditions in which she had ever found herself in all her life,--conditions so bizarre, so grotesque, so impossible that there was no use in trying to consider them--alas! no point in blushing now. Mechanically she settled her little naked feet deep into the big bath-slippers, tucked up her white wool sleeves to the dimpled elbow, and surveyed the soup which he had placed before her to serve. "I know perfectly well that this isn't right," she said, helping him and then herself. "But I am wondering what there is about it that isn't right." "Isn't it demoralising!" he said, amused. "I--wonder if it is?" He laughed: "Such ideas are nonsense, Miss West. Listen to me: you and I--everybody except those with whom something is physically wrong--are born with a full and healthy capacity for demoralisation and mischief. Mischief is only one form of energy. If lightning flies about unguided it's likely to do somebody some damage; if it's conducted properly to a safe terminal there's no damage done and probably a little good."