Jean said she must remain and work. She had thought only to run in and appease Richter, but between his grudging praise and MacGregor's goad, she found her fingers itching for the neglected tools; and she was into her comprehensive studio-apron before Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's electric brougham had purred halfway down the block. The sculptor squandered no more compliments that day, however. Indeed, he swerved heavily to the opposite extreme, but Jean dreamed audacious dreams over the penitential copying of a battered antique, and the afternoon was far gone when she reluctantly stopped work. Leaving Richter's door, she beheld her husband swinging gayly down the street. He waved to her boyishly and quickened his step. "Good news?" she queried. "The very best," he said, seizing both her hands, to the lively edification of two nursemaids, a policeman, and the driver of a passing dray. "I've got my interpretation, Jean! Got it at last! And it came through you!" For some reason, he told her, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves had arrived earlier than her appointment. Julie was out, but luckily she caught him, and so an hour of vast significance tamely began. By and by his sitter mentioned Jean, her work, and Richter's opinions, and plied him with kindly inquisitive questions about their love affair and elopement, till--all in a lightning flash--it came to him that here, peeping from behind the worldly old mask which everybody knew, was another, unguessed Mrs. Joyce-Reeves with a schoolgirl's appetite for romance. "And that is what I want to paint," he declared. "Cynic on the surface, romanticist at heart." The way home was too ridiculously short, and they pieced it out with park and shop-window saunterings. The future was big with promise. Both should wear the bays. "For something she dropped set me thinking," Atwood said. "She sees, like all of us, that children are your forte, and she thinks that in this day of child study, your talent can't fail to make its mark. The janitor's baby seems to have swept her off her feet. She said the janitors, proud race though they be, must not be allowed to monopolize your time. Then she spoke of her great-grandchild, and I think there's something in the wind." Jean trifled with the intoxicating possibilities for a dozen paces. "Oh," she said finally, as if shaking herself awake, "Richter would never consent to my trying such things yet." They composed their frivolous faces under the solemn regard of Julie's butler, who told Jean that a caller awaited her in the library. "A lady from out of town," he added. Jean wondered, "Why the library?" and, then, advancing, wondered again as a silvery tinkle reached her ears; but the chief marvel of all was the spectacle of Julie Van Ostade and Mrs. Fanshaw in amicable, even intimate, converse over afternoon tea. XXV