"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."