"Oh, it very soon gets to be an old story," was his answer. "One studio is very like another." "But their work? That must be awfully interesting." "Yes, to a novice, but that soon gets to be an old story too. An artist is only a man who puts paint or charcoal on cardboard or canvas with more or less cleverness, just as an author is a man who has more or less skill in getting ink on to paper." Miss Merrivale laughed, with more glee than comprehension. "You are always so witty," she said. "I don't wonder your books sell. I think that girl who couldn't tell which man she liked best was just too funny for anything. I can't for the life of me see how you think of such things, anyway." "The trouble isn't to think what to say, but to tell what not to say." "I'm sure I don't know what you mean. Now of course an artist just sees things, and all he has to do is to make pictures of them; but you have to make up things." "But we see things too," the novelist responded, smiling upon her, and reflecting that she was looking uncommonly pretty that morning. "Oh, but that's different. Now you never knew a girl who was hesitating which of two lovers to choose, and she wouldn't tell you how she felt if you did; but there it is all in your book so natural that every girl says to herself that's just the way she should feel." The flattery was too evidently sincere not to be pleasing. So long as praise is genuine, few men are so exacting as to insist that it be also intelligent. "Thank you," he said; "you at least understand the art of saying nice things. Though that," he added, with his warmest smile, "is perhaps only natural in one who must have had so many nice things said to her." She laughed, her ready, girlish laugh, which always seemed to him so young; and they climbed the crooked stairs of Studio Building, their breath hardly being any longer sufficient for much speech. "I'm going to take you to Arthur Fenton's first," Rangely observed, as they paused to rest on one of the landings. "These stairs are awful. I wonder how he gets his elderly sitters up here." Miss Merrivale seated herself upon a bench benevolently placed on the landing. "They sit down here, of course," she responded. "This is a sort of life-saving station," he remarked, seating himself beside her. "Oh, Mr. Rangely, how awfully funny you are." "It's my trade; I have to be to earn my living. Now you and I are the only survivors from a wreck." "Alone on a desert island?" "Life-saving stations are not generally on desert islands; but I hope you wouldn't mind so very much if it were." She looked at him with bright eyes, and then let her glance fall. "That would depend," she responded demurely. "Upon what? How I behaved?" "Oh, of course you'd behave well." "Of course; but how would I have to behave to make you contented on a desert island?" She shot him a keen quick glance from beneath her bent brows. "I never said I should be contented." "But you implied it."