Dill kept his studio up to the general level of the Temple, and himself up to the general level of the studio. There was little trace of Bohemia about either. Society found his workroom a veritable _salon de reception_. He himself never permitted the painter to eclipse the gentleman. People who came late in the afternoon found his tall, slender figure inclosed in a coat of precisely the right length, shape, cut. People who came earlier found him in guise more professional but no less elegant. He took a great deal of pains with his handsome hands, which many visitors pressed with cautious, admiring respect, as something a little too good to be true, as something a little too fine for this workaday world, and with his well-grown beard, which hugged his cheeks closely to make a telling manifestation upon his chin, after the manner of Van Dyck. This beard cried, almost clamoured, for picturesque accessories, and when Daffingdon went to a costume ball he generally wore a ruff and carried a rapier. All these things had their effect, and when people said, "How much?" and Daffingdon with unblinking serenity said, "So much," they quailed sometimes, but they never tried to beat him down. "Why, after all, you know," they would say to one another, as they reconsidered his effective presence and his expensive surroundings,--"why, after all, it isn't as if----" Then they would think of the Rabbit-Hutch and acknowledge that here was a great advance. The poor Bunnies would have blinked--and often had, you may be sure. Daffingdon was a bachelor, and he was old enough or young enough for anything, being just thirty; and his sister Judith, who was some years his senior, sat behind his tea-urn on most occasions and made it possible for the young things of society to flutter in as freely as they willed. The young things came to little in themselves, but some of them had vainglorious mothers and ambitious, pomp-loving fathers, and who could tell in what richly promising crevice their light-minded chatter might lodge and sprout? So Daffingdon and his sister encouraged them to come, and the young things came gladly, willing enough to meet with a break in the social round that was already becoming monotonous; and among the others came Preciosa McNulty,--dear little Preciosa, pretty, warm-hearted, self-willed----But we will wait a bit for _her_, if you please. Daffingdon had spent many years abroad and still kept _au courant_ with European art matters in general; he knew what they were doing in Munich no less than in Paris, and letters with foreign postmarks were always dropping in on him to tempt his mind to little excursions backward across the sea. He kept himself more or less in touch too with the kindred arts, and readily passed in certain circles for a man of the most pronouncedly intellectual and cultivated type.