“I admit that my instincts are unsociable,” he said, with his brush between his teeth. “I don’t see how I am to help it. The conditions of a landscape painter’s life make it necessarily a very solitary and inhuman one. You see I am in the country for the greater part of the year, and I never tell anyone where I go. I call my pictures by fanciful titles, so as not to have to put the name of the place in the catalogues. It is absurd, but then it happens to be the only way I can work. I generally don’t open my lips from June to November, at least not to talk to persons of culture! The other sort doesn’t matter.” “Don’t you care to study people?” she said. “It is my business to study the physiognomy of clouds, the character of tree trunks, not faces!” “Don’t speak so ferociously!” she said laughingly. “You mean that your only books are--not women’s looks. It is Nature who is--your mistress---- ” “Yes, and a nice capricious mistress she is, and very hard her service!” “But she never did betray the heart that loved her--we have that on good authority!” “Betray--no, but she does lead him a dance!” the artist exclaimed passionately. “She rains her tears on him, she blows hurricanes on him, she plagues him with flies, and, what is worse, wasps--she lets him break his back, and contract his chest with stooping, the better to deal with her. She is never the same for two minutes together. She is exacting and exclusive. ‘Thou shalt have no other mistress but me!’ she says. ‘You shall dance attendance on all my moods, and submit to all my caprices, and you shall go on trying to paint the unpaintable all your life, and die before you have succeeded in doing it!’” The painter, having grown a little serious and excited over his own tirade, ended it with a little laugh at himself, and she murmured with apparent inconsequence, “Oh, I think it such a pity--such a waste!” “What do you mean?” he asked her, negligently, and stayed not for an answer--it was a little way he had. She would have been ashamed to admit to him what her meaning had been; that he was still young, that he was handsome, that, in her opinion, such a man was thrown away on the service of Nature. She changed the conversation by offering to read him some passages from the Newcastle paper. He nodded in assent. She first gathered and fastened two large fern fronds behind each ear, as a clerk his pen, to keep away the flies which Rivers’ mistress Nature continued to send him. She felt herself already so hideously travestied, that an added touch of grotesqueness or so did not matter. Then she began to read aloud in her quick, impulsive way. She had not read more than a few sentences, when she stopped suddenly. The painter might, or might not, have been attending to her, but the sudden cessation of her voice inevitably excited his attention. “Well?” he asked her sharply.