“Did you read that article on me in The Weekly?  The man’s a fool!—­knows nothing, and writes like God Almighty.  A little more full face.  That’s it!  I suppose all professions are full of these jealous beasts.  Ours is cluttered up with them—­men who never sell a picture, and make up by living on the compliments of their own little snarling set.  But, upon my word, it makes one rather sick.  Ah, that’s good!  You moved a trifle—­that’s better—­just a moment!”

“I’m glad you let me sit,” said Victoria absently.  “I stood to Whistler once.  It nearly killed me.”

“Ah, Jimmy!” said Delorme.  “Jimmy was a Tartar!”

He went off at score into recollections of Whistler, drawing hard all the time.

Victoria did not listen.  She was thinking of those sounds of footsteps she had heard under her window at dawn, and passing her room.  This morning Harry looked as usual, except for something in the eyes, which none but she would notice.  What had he been doing all those hours?  There was nothing erratic or abnormal about Harry.  Sound sleep from the moment he put his head on his pillow to the moment at eight o’clock when his servant with great difficulty woke him, was the rule with him.

What could have happened the night before—­while he and Lydia Penfold were alone together?  Victoria had seen them come back into the general company, had indeed been restlessly on the watch for their return.  It had seemed to her—­though how be sure in that mingled light?—­both at the moment of their reappearance and afterward, that Harry was somewhat unusually pale and quiet, while the girl’s look had struck her as singular—­exaltee—­the eyes shining—­yet the manner composed and sweet as usual.  She already divined the theorist in Lydia, the speculator with life and conduct.  “But not with my Harry!” thought the mother, fiercely.

But how could she prevent it?  What could she do?  What can any mother do when the wave of energy—­spiritual and physical—­has risen or is rising to its height in the young creature, and the only question is how and where it shall break; in crash and tempest, or in a summer sea?

Delorme suddenly raised his great head from his easel.

“That was a delicious creature that sat by me last night.”

“Miss Penfold?  She is one of your devotees.”

“She paints, so she said. Mon Dieu!  Why do women paint?”

Victoria, roused, hotly defended the right of her sex to ply any honest art in the world that might bring them either pleasure or money.

“Mais la peinture!” Delorme’s shoulder shrugged still higher.  “It is an infernal thing, milady, painting.  What can a woman make of it?  She can only unsex herself.  And in the end—­what she produces—­what is it?”

“If it pays the rent—­isn’t that enough?”

“But a young girl like that!  What, in God’s name, has she do to with paying the rent?  Let her dance and sing—­have a train of lovers—­look beautiful!”