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Then it came over me that she had made a great effort for me–made it with a kind of nobleness–and that I owed her a compensation. Each time I saw her after this I wondered what the compensation could be. I couldn’t go on doing the wrong thing to oblige them. Oh it wasthe wrong thing, the stamp of the work for which they sat–Hawley was not the only person to say it now. I sent in a large number of the drawings I had made for “Rutland Ramsay,” and I received a warning that was more to the point than Hawley’s. The artistic advisor of the house for which I was working was of opinion that many of my illustrations were not what had been looked for. Most of these illustrations were the subjects in which the Monarchs had figured. Without going into the question of what hadbeen looked for, I had to face the fact that at this rate I shouldn’t get the other books to do. I hurled myself in despair on Miss Churm–I put her through all her paces. I not only adopted Oronte publicly as my hero, but one morning when the Major looked in to see if I didn’t require him to finish a Cheapsidefigure for which he had begun to sit the week before, I told him I had changed my mind–I’d do the drawing from my man. At this my visitor turned pale and stood looking at me.”Is heyour idea of an English gentleman?” he asked.

I was disappointed. I was nervous, I wanted to get on with my work; so I replied with irritation: “Oh my dear Major–I can’t be ruined for you!”

It was a horrid speech, but he stood another moment–after which, without a word, he quitted the studio. I drew a long breath, for I said to myself that I shouldn’t see him again. I hadn’t told him definitely that I was in danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of our fruitless collaboration, the lesson that in the deceptive atmosphere of art even the highest respectability may fail of being plastic.

I didn’t owe my friends money, but I did see them again. They reappeared together three days later, and, given all the other facts, there was something tragic in that one. It was a clear proof they could find nothing else in life to do. They had threshed the matter out in a dismal conference–they had digested the bad news that they were not in for the series. If they weren’t useful to me even for the Cheapsidetheir function seemed difficult to determine, and I could only judge at first that they had come, forgivingly, decorously, to take a last leave. This made me rejoice in secret that I had little leisure for a scene; for I had placed both my other models in position together and I was pegging away at a drawing from which I hoped to derive glory. It had been suggested by the passage in which Rutland Ramsay, drawing up a chair to Artemisia’s piano-stool, says extraordinary things to her while she ostensibly fingers out a difficult piece of music. I had done Miss Churm at the piano before–it was an attitude in which she knew how to take on an absolutely poetic grace. I wished the two figures to “compose” together with intensity, and my little Italian had entered perfectly into my conception. The pair were vividly before me, the piano had been pulled out; it was a charming show of blended youth and murmured love, which I had only to catch and keep. My visitors stood and looked at it, and I was friendly to them over my shoulder.