Mrs. Pope, after a time, came and captured Peter; she did not approve of the hiding of her lion in the library. She took him into the drawing-room, where a great many people were drinking tea and talking, and he was passed dexterously from group to group; Mrs. Pope, gay and stout, shuffling the pack and generously giving every one a glimpse of her trump. It was a fatiguing process, and he was glad to find himself at last in Mrs. Pope's undivided possession. He was sitting on a sofa beside her, talking and drinking a well-concocted cup of tea, when a picture on the opposite wall attracted his attention. He put down the cup of tea and put up his eyeglasses to look at it. A woman in a dress of Japanese blue, holding a paper fan; pink azaleas in the foreground. The decorative outline and the peculiar tonality made it unmistakable. He got up to look more closely. Yes, there was the delicate flowing signature: "Hilda Archinard." He turned to Mrs. Pope in pleased surprise. "I didn't know that Hilda had reached this degree of popularity. You are very lucky. Did she give it to you?" Katherine's engagement was generally known, and Mrs. Pope reproached herself for having failed to draw Mr. Odd's attention before this to the work of his future sister. "Oh no; she is altogether too distinguished a little person to give away her pictures. That was in the Champs de Mars last year. I bought it. The two others sold as well. I believe she sells most of her things; for high prices, too. Always the way, you know; a starving genius is allowed to starve, but material success comes to a pretty girl who doesn't need it. Katherine is so well known in Paris that Hilda's public was already made for her; there was no waiting for the appreciation that is her due. Her work is certainly charming." Peter felt a growing sense of anxiety. He could not share Mrs. Pope's feeling of easy pleasantness. Hilda _did_ need it. Certainly there was nothing pathetic in doing what she liked best and making money at it. Yet he wondered just how far Hilda's earnings helped the family; kept the butcher and baker at bay. With a new keenness of conjecture he thought of the black serge dress; somewhere about Hilda's artistic indifference there might well lurk a tragic element. Did she not really care to wear the amethyst velvets that her earnings perhaps went to provide? The vague distress that had never left him since his first disappointment at the Embassy dinner, that the afternoon's discovery at the atelier had sharpened, now became acute. "I always think it such a pretty compensation of Providence," said Mrs. Pope, gracefully anxious to please, "that all the talent that Hilda Archinard expresses, puts on her canvas, is more personal in Katherine; is part of herself as it were, like a perfume about her." "Yes," said Odd rather dully, not particularly pleased with the comparison.