"Because I take for granted he'd have called on me if he had." "Does he like you very much?" the girl asked. "I don't know. I like _him_." "He's a gentleman--_pour cela_," she said. "Oh yes, for that!" Nick went on absently, labouring hard. "But he's afraid of me--afraid to see me." "Doesn't he think you good enough?" "On the contrary--he believes I shall carry him away and he's in a terror of my doing it." "He ought to like that," said Nick with conscious folly. "That's what I mean when I say he's not an artist. However, he declares he does like it, only it appears to be not the right thing for him. Oh the right thing--he's ravenous for that. But it's not for me to blame him, since I am too. He's coming some night, however. Then," she added almost grimly, "he shall have a dose." "Poor Peter!" Nick returned with a compassion none the less real because it was mirthful: the girl's tone was so expressive of easy unscrupulous power. "He's such a curious mixture," she luxuriously went on; "sometimes I quite lose patience with him. It isn't exactly trying to serve both God and Mammon, but it's muddling up the stage and the world. The world be hanged! The stage, or anything of that sort--I mean one's artistic conscience, one's true faith--comes first." "Brava, brava! you do me good," Nick murmured, still amused, beguiled, and at work. "But it's very kind of you, when I was in this absurd state of ignorance, to impute to me the honour of having been more struck with you than any one else," he continued after a moment. "Yes, I confess I don't quite see--when the shops were full of my photographs." "Oh I'm so poor--I don't go into shops," he explained. "Are you very poor?" "I live on alms." "And don't they pay you--the government, the ministry?" "Dear young lady, for what?--for shutting myself up with beautiful women?" "Ah you've others then?" she extravagantly groaned. "They're not so kind as you, I confess." "I'll buy it from you--what you're doing: I'll pay you well when it's done," said the girl. "I've got money now. I make it, you know--a good lot of it. It's too delightful after scraping and starving. Try it and you'll see. Give up the base, bad world." "But isn't it supposed to be the base, bad world that pays?" "Precisely; make it pay without mercy--knock it silly, squeeze it dry. That's what it's meant for--to pay for art. Ah if it wasn't for that! I'll bring you a quantity of photographs to-morrow--you must let me come back to-morrow: it's so amusing to have them, by the hundred, all for nothing, to give away. That's what takes mamma most: she can't get over it. That's luxury and glory; even at Castle Nugent they didn't do that. People used to sketch me, but not so much as mamma _veut bien le dire_; and in all my life I never had but one poor little carte-de-visite, when I was sixteen, in a plaid frock, with the banks of a river, at three francs the dozen." XXVI