"Portraits which please a father and mother proud of a handsome son are not exactly in my line," she said. "I like wrinkles and irregular features. It's a sort of specialism with me to pick out these as the salient points. There's no telling what I might do with you." "Of course, Helen's forte is caricature," Henriette explained. "I quite understand her reasons"--she paused, lowering her head and looking at Phil through her lashes, daring a thrust--"after having spent days with your features." "Not to mention that I have spent days with yours!" he thrust back. "The penalty of not having had a profile view!" "It is I who am to make the profile--I had forgotten that," said Helen. "We'll do it this morning. I feel in the mood." He was not long in doubt as to the nature of the mood. It was an abandon of fanciful humour. "Mind, you are not to look around at me, but at Henriette!" she said warningly, as they went up the path. "I'm strictly unofficial." He had hardly settled himself in his pose when she broke out laughing. He looked around inquiringly. "You are breaking the rules!" she cried. "Remember, you got yourself into this and you must play the game. I'm making a profile." "I can't help it, can I, because I am so fond of myself that I want more and more pictures of myself?" he complained quizzically. "Posing may yet become a disease with me." "You will be crying too much cousin as well as too much ancestor," said Henriette, entering into the spirit of the occasion. He was at their mercy. "It's the third degree of cousinship!" he said. What would the class of 1911, let alone P. O'Brien, the foreman of the construction gang at Las Palmas, say if they saw him now? P. O'Brien, at least, would not call it "a man's job." There were two voices in his ears: one from lips he could not see and the other from those he could. Leisurely, Henriette mixed her colours, inclining her head this way and that as she did when she looked at her hair in the mirror. Then the graceful arm rose and the slim fingers, holding the brush daintily, put a dab on the canvas. "Did you wear spurs?" asked the voice of the unseen person. "What?" "Don't look around! I mean, did you wear spurs when you were in the Southwest? Of course you did, hugeous Spanish spurs and an enormous sombrero and woolly sheepskin trousers." "As you say!" Phil replied. "You see, I am doing cartoons of our hero's life," Helen explained. "Here he is as he saw himself and the Rocky Mountains when he first arrived, with his college diploma under his arm." Only lines of hieroglyphic simplicity, and Phil in enormous spurs and sombrero, with a great roll of parchment under his arm, was looking down on some ant-hills. Only lines, but the nose and the chin under the sombrero's were unmistakably Phil's. "Now, as our hero sees himself roping his first steer--and as he really was!" she went on. "We are all for realism."