“Why?”

“Well,” he admitted with a laugh, “it’s probably because I like to hear myself talk to you.  Besides, I’ve always the hope that you’ll suddenly become conversational, and that’s a possibility exciting enough to give anybody an appetite.”

“But I have conversed with you,” she said.

“Only a little.  What you said acted like a cocktail to inspire me for a desire for more.”

“I am afraid that you were not named Kelly in vain.”

“You mean blarney?  No, it’s merely frankness.  Let me get you some bath-slippers—­”

“Oh—­but if I am to lunch here—­I can’t do it this way!” she exclaimed in flushed consternation.

“Indeed you must learn to do that without embarrassment, Miss West.  Tie up your robe at the throat, tuck up your sleeves, slip your feet into a nice pair of brand-new bath-slippers, and I’ll ring for luncheon.”

“I—­don’t—­want to—­” she began; but he went away into the hall, rang, and presently she heard the ascending clatter of a dumb-waiter.  From it he took the luncheon card and returned to where she was sitting at a rococo table.  She blushed as he laid the card before her, and would have nothing to do with it.  The result was that he did the ordering, sent the dumb-waiter down with his scribbled memorandum, and came wandering back with long, cool glances at his canvas and the work he had done on it.

“I mean to make a stunning thing of it,” he remarked, eying the huge chassis critically.  “All this—­deviltry—­whatever it is inside of me—­must come out somehow.  And that canvas is the place for it.”  He laughed and sat down opposite her: 

“Man is born to folly, Miss West—­born full of it.  I get rid of mine on canvas.  It’s a safer outlet for original sin than some other ways.”

She lay back in her antique gilded chair, hands extended along the arms, looking at him with a smile that was still shy.

“My idea of you—­of an artist—­was so different,” she said.

“There are all kinds, mostly the seriously inspired and humourless variety who makes a mystic religion of a very respectable profession.  This world is full of pale, enraptured artists; full of muscular, thumb-smearing artists; full of dreamy weavers of visions, usually deficient in spinal process; full of unwashed little inverts to whom the world really resembles a kaleidoscope full of things that wiggle—­”

They began to laugh, he with a singular delight in her comprehension of his idle, irresponsible chatter, she from sheer pleasure in listening and looking at this man who was so different from anybody she had ever known—­and, thank God!—­so young.

And when the bell rang and the clatter announced the advent of luncheon, she settled in her chair with a little shiver of happiness, blushing at her capacity for it, and at her acquiescence in the strangest conditions in which she had ever found herself in all her life,—­conditions so bizarre, so grotesque, so impossible that there was no use in trying to consider them—­alas! no point in blushing now.