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“Ah Claude Rivet recommended me?” I echoes; and I added that it was very kind of him, though I could reflect that, as he only painted landscape, this wasn’t a sacrifice.

The lady looked very hard at the gentleman, and the gentleman looked round the room. Then staring at the floor a moment and stroking his moustache, he rested his pleasant eyes on me with the remark: “He said you were the right one.”

“I try to be, when people want to sit.”

“Yet, we should like to,” said the lady anxiously.

“Do you mean together?”

My visitors exchanged a glance.”If you could do anything with meI suppose it would be double,” the gentleman stammered.

“Oh yet, there’s naturally a higher charge for two figures than for one.”

“We should like to make it pay,” the husband confessed.

“that’s very good of you,” I returned, appreciating so unwonted a sympathy–for I supposed he meant pay the artist.

A sense of strangeness seemed to draw on the lady.

“We mean for the illustrations–Mr. Rivet said you might put one in.”

“Put in–an illustration? I was equally confused.

“Sketch her off, you know,” said the gentleman, colouring.

It was only then that I understood the service Claude Rivet had rendered me; he had told them how I worked in black-and-white, for magazines, for storybooks, for sketches of contemporary life, and consequently had copious employment for models. These things were true, but it was not less true–I may confess it now; whether because the aspiration was to lead to everything or to nothing I leave the reader to guess–that I couldn’t get the honours, to say nothing of the emoluments, of a great painter of portraits out of my head. My “illustrations” were my pot-boilers; I looked to a different branch of art–far and away the most interesting it had always seemed to me–to perpetuate my fame. There was no shame in looking to it also to make my fortune; but that fortune was by so much further from being made from the moment my visitors wished to be “done” for nothing. I was disappointed; for in the pictorial sense I had immediately seenthem. I had seized their type-I had already settled what I would do with it. Something that wouldn’t absolutely have pleased them, I afterwards reflected.

“Ah you’re–you’re–a–?” I began as soon as I had mastered my surprise. I couldn’t bring out the dingy word “models”: it seemed so little to fit the case.

“We haven’t had much practice,” said the lady.

“We’ve got to dosomething, and we’re thought that an artist in your line might perhaps make something of us,” her husband threw off. He further mentioned that they didn’t know many artists and that they had gone first, on the off-chance–he painted views of course, but sometimes put in figures; perhaps I remembered–to Mr. Rivet, whom they had met a few years before at a place in Norfolk where he was sketching.

“We used to sketch a little ourselves,” the lady hinted.

“It’s very awkward, but we absolutely mustdo something,” her husband went on.

“Of course we’re not so veryyoung,” she admitted with a wan smile.

With the remark that I might as well know something more about them the husband had handed me a card extracted from a neat new pocket-book–their appurtenances were all of the freshest–and inscribed with the words “Major Monarch.” Impressive as these word were they didn’t carry my knowledge much further; but my visitor presently added: “I’ve left the army and we’ve had the misfortune to lose our money. In fact our means are dreadfully small.”

“It’s awfully trying–a regular strain,” said Mrs. Monarch.

They evidently wished to be discreet–to take care not to swagger because they were gentlefolk. I felt them willing to recognise this a something of a drawback, at the same time that I guessed at an underlying sense–they consolation in adversity–that they hadtheir points. They certainly had; but these advantages struck me as preponderantly social; such for instance as would help to make a drawing-room look well. However, a drawing-room was always, or ought to be, a picture.