He took it from her, tore it savagely into pieces, and threw them on the floor. "So be it," he answered wrathfully. "You must indeed be succeeding as you deserve, to reject what you have lawfully earned." Jill went white as she generally did when in a rage, and favoured him with a glance that he was not likely to forget in a hurry. "I have not earned it," she responded, "neither am I succeeding; two facts which you are thoroughly well acquainted with. Does _that_ look like success?" And she drew from the cardboard box the sachets she had brought home again from the shop that morning, and threw them on the table in front of him. "That's the kind of work that I have come to do, and I daresay I shall sink lower yet;--Xmas cards no doubt. Oh! yes, I have sunk pretty low. The man who gave me that order superintends the work, and corrects errors of detail. He does not like female figures in atmospheric drapery like those. He said the public wouldn't buy them that way; a nude figure on a nightdress bag--he didn't use the word nude, by the way, but plain vulgar English--was too suggestive, and requested me to take them home and paint in a garment--`Just a small one'--as though he were alluding to a vest. Ugh! it makes me sick--it makes me _blush_. He wears his hair oiled, too," she continued retrospectively, forgetting for the minute her resentment against St. John in disgust at her latest patron, "and--further degradation--makes love to me which for the sake of the miserable commission I dare not resent." What followed was unpardonable on St. John's part but for the life of him he could not resist retaliating for the thrusts that she had given him. "Perhaps the last is a hallucination," he suggested ungenerously; "You have a tendency to imagine that sort of thing you know." She eyed him for a moment in stony displeasure, then pointed imperiously to the door. "You may consider that remark worthy of a gentleman, Mr St. John," she said, "I don't. You will oblige me by leaving the studio at once; I--I shall be rude to you if you don't." Her voice broke, and she turned to her work again abruptly, painting with feverish haste as thought she had not a moment to lose. In two strides St. John was behind her, and stooping he put his arms about her with a swift movement for which she was entirely unprepared, and which imprisoned her so firmly that she could not escape. "Rude to me if you like," he cried; "but not unkind, Jill--never any more."