“Now it was a pleasant little vanity for me to take it for granted that somehow you had heard of me and had climbed twelve flights of stairs for the privilege of sitting for me.”

He laughed so frankly that the shy, responsive smile made her face enchanting; and he coolly took advantage of it, and while exciting and stimulating it, affixed it immortally on the exquisite creature he was painting.

“So you didn’t climb those twelve flights solely for the privilege of having me paint you?”

“No,” she admitted, laughingly, “I was merely going to begin at the top and apply for work all the way down until somebody took me—­or nobody took me.”

“But why begin at the top?”

“It is easier to bear disappointment going down,” she said, seriously; “if two or three artists had refused me on the first and second floors, my legs would not have carried me up very far.”

“Bad logic,” he commented.  “We mount by experience, using our wrecked hopes as footholds.”

“You don’t know how much a girl can endure.  There comes a time-after years of steady descent—­when misfortune and disappointment become endurable; when hope deferred no longer sickens.  It is in rising toward better things that disappointments hurt most cruelly.”

He turned his head in surprise; then went on painting: 

“Your philosophy is the philosophy of submission.”

“Do you call a struggle of years, submission?”

“But it was giving up after all—­acquiescence, despondency, a laissez faire policy.”

“One may tire of fighting.”

“One may.  Another may not.”

“I think you have never had to fight very hard.”

He turned his head abruptly; after a moment’s silent survey of her, he resumed his painting with a sharp, impersonal glance before every swift and decisive brush stroke: 

“No; I have never had to fight, Miss West....  It was keen of you to recognise it.  I have never had to fight at all.  Things come easily to me—­things have a habit of coming my way....  I suppose I’m not exactly the man to lecture anybody on the art of fighting fortune.  She’s always been decent to me....  Sometimes I’m afraid—­I have an instinct that she’s too friendly....  And it troubles me.  Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes.”

He looked up at her:  “Are you sure?”

“I think so.  I have been watching you painting.  I never imagined anybody could draw so swiftly, so easily—­paint so surely, so accurately—­that every brush stroke could be so—­so significant, so decisive....  Is it not unusual?  And is not that what is called facility?”

“Lord in Heaven!” he said; “what kind of a girl am I dealing with?—­or what kind of a girl is dealing so unmercifully with me?”

“I—­I didn’t mean—­”

“Yes, you did.  Those very lovely and wonderfully shaped eyes of yours are not entirely for ornament.  Inside that pretty head there’s an apparatus designed for thinking; and it isn’t idle.”