Besides these vexations the artist had, moreover, other causes for uneasiness at this time. His financial affairs were by no means in satisfactory condition. He had been filling a good many orders and getting excellent prices for his work, yet somehow he had been all the year running behindhand. He lived beyond his means, priding himself upon being the one Boston artist who had been born, bred, and educated a gentleman, as he chose to put it to himself, and who was able to live as a man of the world should. His summer had been passed at Newport, a place which Edith by no means liked, and where her ideas of propriety and religion were constantly offended, especially in regard to the sanctity of marriage. He entertained sumptuously, spent money freely at the clubs, and, in a word, tried to be no less a man of fashion than an artist. The result was beginning to be disastrous. Living pretty closely up to his income, a few losses and a speculation or two which turned out unlucky, were sufficient to embarrass him seriously. It was the old trite and dreary story of extravagance and its inevitable consequence; and as Fenton had no talent for finance, his struggles rather made matters worse than bettered them, as the efforts of a fly to escape from the web, even although they may damage the net, are apt to end also in binding the victim more securely. The truth was that the painter, like many another man endowed with imaginative gifts, had little practical knowledge of affairs beyond a talent for spending money; and it is amazing how stupid a clever man can contrive to be when he is taken out of his sphere. For such men there is no safety save in keeping out of debt, and once the balance was on the wrong side of his account, Fenton, self-poised as he was, lost his head. It troubled and worried him to be in debt even when he could see his way clear to paying everything, and now that matters began to get too complicated to be settled by plain and obvious arithmetic, he was miserable. In the midst of these unhappy complications, he was one morning working upon the portrait of Miss Damaris Wainwright, whose cousin and aunts, the Dimmonts, had induced her to have it painted, although she was in deep mourning. He was interested in the lovely, melancholy girl, and he felt that he was doing some of the best work of his life in her portrait. He sometimes was proud of his skill, and at others he was unreasonably vexed that this picture should be so much better than that of Mr. Hubbard promised to be. He had been talking this morning half-absently, and merely for the sake of keeping his sitter interested. He had not noticed that her whole being was keyed up to a pitch of intense feeling, and he had almost unconsciously accomplished the really difficult task of putting his sitter at her ease and making her ready to talk. Suddenly, after a brief silence, she said,--"You provoke confidences."