"I hope you'll keep your head, Jean," she admonished solemnly. "This is a great come-up in the world for you." An impish impulse took shape in Jean's brain, and, under cover of showing the house, she guided Mrs. Fanshaw by edifying stages to Craig's temporary studio and the great work. "A portrait he's doing!" she dropped carelessly. Her mother as carelessly bestowed a brief glance upon the canvas. "What a wrinkled old woman," she commented, turning away. "But I suppose it is the money your husband is thinking of?" "Partly." "What will he get for it?" Jean pondered demurely. "It is hard to say. Perhaps a thousand, perhaps two thousand dollars." "What!" She wheeled upon the portrait. "Why, who is the woman?" "Mrs. Joyce-Reeves." The effect was as dramatic as Jean's unfilial fancy had hoped. "The Mrs. Joyce-Reeves of Fifth Avenue and Newport?" "And of Lenox, Aiken, and Ormond--yes." Mrs. Fanshaw's attitude toward the portrait became reverential. Here was hallowed ground! "Have you met _her_, too?" she asked finally, with the realization that even her child might share the sacerdotal mysteries. "Yes." "You have _talked_ with her?" "Only this afternoon." "Here?" "She was here to-day, for a sitting, but I ran across her at Mr. Richter's studio." "That is where you go to--" "To model; yes." Then, with great calm, "Mrs. Joyce-Reeves admires my work." A chastened, pensive, almost deferential, being, who from time to time stole puzzled glances at her ugly duckling turned swan, let herself be shown to her room and smartened for dinner, to which she descended at what seemed to her robust appetite an unconscionably late hour. Here the fame of her son-in-law and the even more disconcerting attentions of the butler combined to make her subjugation complete. Sweet as was her victory, however, Jean had no wish to see her mother ill at ease, and she rejoiced when Craig exerted himself to entertain this visitor whose subdued, almost shy, manner was so bewilderingly at variance with the forbidding image his fancy had set up. Moreover, he succeeded. If Mrs. Fanshaw's parochial outlook dulled the edge of his choicer quips and anecdotes, his boyish charm, at least, required no footnotes; and before the dinner ended she was bearing her gustful share in the conversation with such largess of detail that a far less imaginative listener than he might reconstruct therefrom the whole social and economic fabric of Shawnee Springs.