'Will you for me? I am painting a picture, and I should be very grateful if you would.' The unsmiling directness of the tone made the request very much a matter of business. Betty said she would. 'Warren and Prudence are always painting,' Miranda explained mournfully. 'Their pictures are rotten, I think; I hate them.' The Crevequers went. 'Very picturesque; very striking; very sad,' Mrs. Venables observed. 'Very obvious,' Warren commented. 'I would have betted a guinea that Crevequer would borrow from me; he did. I call that so obvious as to be tiresome.' To his cousin, a little later, he remarked: 'You're standing on a quite false pedestal of superiority, you know. Because you're going to paint her yourself. Where's the difference?' 'Ah, well, there is some. To me she's frankly copy, you see; I shall pretend nothing else; I shan't call it making friends--don't you see? There's where it comes in.' 'All the same, you'll be doing what you repudiate; you'll be making use for your own ends of what you wouldn't otherwise have anything to do with. You're in a false position; you can't escape that by sophistries.' 'If I am, I shall have to be more than ever careful not to make it falser by throwing veils over it,' said Prudence Varley consideringly. She had the air of a person of a very delicate sense of justice--delicate almost to exaggeration. One detected it in her farsighted grey eyes, with the twinkle that lurked just within call. Warren chuckled. 'Poor model! You needn't make it so hard as all that for her; let her have a veil or two--it's so much more comfortable.' Prudence shook her head with decision. 'It wouldn't be fair; it would be ugly.' Warren smiled again--at her characteristic habit of arriving, with great deliberation, at her own position in a matter, and remaining in it unshaken. If to her perception an immense difference stretched between the frankness of taking copy as such, and ending there, and the course of tact and sympathy and 'achievement of intimacy' which his mother pursued, no accusations of sophistry or overniceness would bridge that gulf to her. 'Well,' Venables said, half defensively, 'Mother really is interested, you know--very much so.' Prudence frowned over it, half abstractedly. 'As I see it, you either like people or you don't. If you don't, and yet make use of them, they've got to know how the thing stands and all about it.' 'The Crevequers, you know,' Venables said, 'are quite clever enough to know "all about it," even if you do use a veil or two.'