"Easily. I shall be so cross and disagreeable that you will get tired of me, and find no more difficulty in keeping me out of your pictures." But he got me out of his pictures without that; for when he had me always before him he didn't want to be always producing me. He led me into the little hall,--made lovely by a cast of an unfinished Madonna of Michael Angelo's let into the wall,--and then to the back of it, where he opened a small cloth-covered door, when there yawned before me, below me, and above me, a great wide lofty room. Down into it led an almost perpendicular stair. "So you keep a little private precipice here," I said. "No, my dear," he returned; "you mistake. It is a Jacob's ladder,--or will be in one moment more." He gave me his hand, and led me down. "This is quite a banqueting-hall, Percivale!" I cried, looking round me. "It shall be, the first time I get a thousand pounds for a picture," he returned. "How grand you talk!" I said, looking up at him with some wonder; for big words rarely came out of his mouth. "Well," he answered merrily, "I had two hundred and seventy-five for the last." "That's a long way off a thousand," I returned, with a silly sigh. "Quite right; and, therefore, this study is a long way off a banqueting-hall." There was literally nothing inside the seventeen feet cube except one chair, one easel, a horrible thing like a huge doll, with no end of joints, called a lay figure, but Percivale called it his bishop; a number of pictures leaning their faces against the walls in attitudes of grief that their beauty was despised and no man would buy them; a few casts of legs and arms and faces, half a dozen murderous-looking weapons, and a couple of yards square of the most exquisite tapestry I ever saw. "Do you like being read to when you are at work?" I asked him. "Sometimes,--at certain kinds of work, but not by any means always," he answered. "Will you shut your eyes for one minute," he went on, "and, whatever I do, not open them till I tell you?" "You mustn't hurt me, then, or I may open them without being able to help it, you know," I said, closing my eyes tight. "Hurt you!" he repeated, with a tone I would not put on paper if I could, and the same moment I found myself in his arms, carried like a baby, for Percivale is one of the strongest of men. It was only for a few yards, however. He laid me down somewhere, and told me to open my eyes.