Joyce took a lamp from the mantel. “You will come, too, Ruth?” he said. His wife was divided between her sense of responsibility and her desires. She nodded helplessly towards the outcast, where he grovelled noisily over his food. “Jeffy will stay here until we come back, won't you, Jeffy?” ventured Joyce, insinuatingly. “Sure I will. There isn't anything to take me out, unless it's them black gloves.” Mrs. Joyce led the way into the hall. “I am so afraid when he's out of my sight,” she explained to Oakley. “We've had such trouble in getting him put to rights. I couldn't go through it again. He's so trying.” The parlor had been fitted up as a studio. There were cheap draperies on the walls, and numerous pictures and sketches. In one corner was a shelf of books, with Somebody's _Lives of the Painters_ ostentatiously displayed. Standing on the floor, their faces turned in, were three or four unfinished canvases. There was also a miscellaneous litter about the room, composed of Indian relics and petrified wood. It was popularly supposed that an artist naturally took an interest in curios of this sort, his life being devoted to an impractical search after the beautiful, and the farmer who ploughed up a petrified rail, or discovered an Indian hand-mill, carted it in to poor Joyce, who was too tender-hearted to rebel; consequently he had been the recipient of several tons of broken rock, and would have been swamped by the accumulation, had not Mrs. Joyce from time to time conveyed these offerings to the back yard. Joyce held the lamp, so Oakley might have a better view of the pictures on the wall. “Perhaps you will like to see my earlier paintings first. There! Is the light good? That was Mrs. Joyce just after our marriage.” Oakley saw a plump young lady, with her hair elaborately banged and a large bouquet in her hand. The background was a landscape, with a ruined Greek temple in the distance. “Here she is a year later; and here she is again, and over there in the corner above my easel.” He swept the lamp back to the first picture. “She hasn't changed much, has she?” Oakley was no critic, yet he realized that the little artist's work was painfully literal and exact, but then he had a sneaking idea that a good photograph was more satisfactory than an oil painting, anyhow. What he could comprehend and appreciate, however, was Mrs. Joyce's attitude towards her husband's masterpieces. She was wholly and pathetically reverent. It was the sublime, unshaken faith and approval that marriage sometimes wins for a man. “I am so sorry the light isn't any better. Mr. Oakley must come in in the afternoon,” she said, anxiously. “I suppose you have seen some of the best examples of the modern painters,” said Joyce, with a tinge of wistful envy in his tones. “You know I never have. I haven't been fifty miles from Antioch in my life.” Oakley was ashamed to admit that the modern painters were the least of his cares, so he said nothing.