“It’s a fraud,” he observed, in a loud, confidential aside to Stephanie; “this studio ought to be full of young men in velvet coats and bunchy ties, singing, ‘Oh la—­la!’ and dextrously balancing on their baggy knees a series of assorted soubrettes.  It’s a bluff, a hoax, a con game!  Are you going to stand for it?  I don’t see any absinthe either—­or even any Vin ordinaire!  Only a tea-pot—­a tea-pot!” he repeated in unutterable scorn.  “Why, there’s more of Bohemia in a Broad Street Trust Company than there is in this Pullman car studio!”

Mrs. Collis was laughing so that her brother had difficulty in going on with her portrait.

“Get out of here, Sandy,” he said—­“or take Stephanie into the rest of the apartment, somewhere, and tell her your woes.”

Stephanie, who had been exploring, turning over piles of chassis and investigating canvases and charcoal studies stacked up here and there against the wainscot, pulled aside an easel which impeded her progress, and in so doing accidentally turned the canvas affixed to it toward the light.

“Hello!” exclaimed Cameron briskly, “who is this?”

Lily turned her small, aristocratic head, and Stephanie looked around.

“What a perfectly beautiful girl!” she exclaimed impulsively; “who is she, Louis?”

“A model,” he said calmly; but the careless and casual exposure of the canvas had angered him so suddenly that his own swift emotion astonished him.

Lily had risen from her seat, and now stood looking fixedly at the portrait of Valerie West, her furs trailing from one shoulder to the chair.

“My eye and Betty Martin!” cried Cameron, “I’ll take it all back, girls!  It’s a real studio after all—­and this is the real thing!  Louis, do you think she’s seen the Aquarium?  I’m disengaged after three o’clock—­”

He began to kiss his hand rapidly in the direction of the portrait, and then, fondly embracing his own walking stick, he took a few jaunty steps in circles, singing “Waltz me around again, Willy.”

Lily Collis said:  “If your model is as lovely as her portrait, Louis, she is a real beauty.  Who is she?”

“A professional model.”  He could scarcely contain his impatience with his sister, with Cameron’s fat humour, with Stephanie’s quiet and intent scrutiny—­as though, somehow, he had suddenly exposed Valerie herself to the cool and cynically detached curiosity of a world which she knew must always remain unfriendly to her.

He was perfectly aware that his sister had guessed whose portrait confronted them; he supposed, too, that Stephanie probably suspected.  And the knowledge irritated him more than the clownishness of Cameron.

“It is a splendid piece of painting,” said Stephanie cordially, and turned quietly to a portfolio of drawings at her elbow.  She had let her fleeting glance rest on Neville for a second; had divined in a flash that he was enduring and not courting their examination of this picture; that, somehow, her accidental discovery of it had displeased him—­was even paining him.