“I’m sorry,” said Conkling, “but the two Constables are only copies, and there’s no chance of being mistaken when I say the Holbein is a palpable forgery. The Correggio is not even worth considering. It impresses me as a gallery student’s sketch—the sort of thing they used to sell to tourists by the mile. Strictly speaking, it has no commercial value. As for the others—well, candidly, I’m afraid it would scarcely pay you to put them in an agent’s hands. They’re not the character of work a city dealer could handle—could handle with any degree of profit to you and your aunts, I mean.” She studied his face with her questioning, grave eyes. “I was afraid so,” she finally said, with a new listlessness in her voice. “I know it hurts,” he said, moving toward her, “and I’m sorry.” “Sorry for what?” she asked with no reciprocal movement. “That instead of bringing you happiness at the very first I’ve only been able to bring you the other thing.” “I wasn’t thinking about myself,” she told him. “I was thinking more about them.” He knew that she meant the two strange old women with whom she lived, with whom she had lived; and in the strong side light, as she stood there still vital and ardent and unawakened, he tried to picture her face as it might be in the years to come, pinched with time and penury, devitalized by the vampire seasons which would drink up the blood from her warm bosom, dulled and hardened by the mean and monotonous years of backwater existence. She impressed him as too warm and rich to be wasted on that sterile air, and he fell to wondering how she would respond to the world as he knew it, to that tranquil and sophisticated world which would be so new to her. Under the fuller sun of freedom, he told himself, she would open up like one of the tea roses in the old manor-house garden below them. He imagined her emerging from the Pennsylvania Station in a taxi-cab, with all New York towering about her in the pale gold of early autumn. But that thought stopped short, for she was speaking again. “It was their only hope,” she was saying, with her meditative eyes on the leaning array of canvases. “It seemed the only thing that could have saved them from all their hopelessness, from all the misery that has made them what they are.” He thought of that sepulchral pair, immured in their withered and Old World narrownesses, but he thought of them without pity. They were as set as granite, those two old vultures, and nothing would ever move them—would ever change them. “It will mean just keeping on in the same old way until the end,” he heard the voice of Julia Keswick saying. “But surely there’s some way out for them,” he protested without giving much thought to his words. “There is!” asserted the girl with a flash of what seemed defiance on her face. “What is it?” he asked. “There is a painting I haven’t shown you.”