“Patty has the top floor—­there’s a studio.”  Drawing her skirts away from the children, for her generation feared contact with the lower classes, Mrs. Fowler walked briskly to the low brown steps, on which an ash can stood waiting for removal.  Inside, where the hall smelled uninvitingly of stale cooking, they rang for the elevator under a dim yellow light which revealed a hundred secret lines in their faces.

“I can’t imagine how Patty puts up with the place,” remarked Patty’s mother dejectedly.  “You wouldn’t believe the trouble we went to to start her well.  She was the acknowledged beauty of her winter—­everybody was crazy about her looks—­and the very week before she ran off with Billy she had a proposal from the Duke of Toxbridge.  Of course, if I’d ever dreamed she had a fancy for Billy, I’d have kept him out of her sight instead of allowing him to paint her portrait whenever she had any time she could spare.  But who on earth would have suspected it?  Billy King, whom she had known all her life, as poor as a church mouse, and the kind of painter whose work will never ‘take’ if he lives to be a thousand!  His portraits may be good art—­I don’t pretend to know anything about that—­but I do know pictures of pretty women when I see them, and his women are frights, every last one of them.  If you’re thin, he paints your skeleton, and if you’re fat, he makes you as square as a house, and, thin or fat, he always gives you a blue and yellow complexion.  He wouldn’t even make Patty white, though I implored him to do it—­and he made her look exactly ten years older than her age.”

“I’ve never seen any portraits of living people—­only of ancestors,” said Gabriella, “and I am so much interested.”

“Well, you mustn’t judge them by Billy’s, my dear, even if he did get all those prizes in Paris.  But I always said the French were queer, and if they hadn’t been, they would never have raved so over the things Billy painted.  Now, Augustus Featherfield’s are really charming.  One can tell to look at his portraits that he paints only ladies, and he gives them all the most perfectly lovely hair, whether they have it or not.  Some day I’ll take you to his studio and let you see for yourself.”

The elevator descended, creaking beneath the weight of a negro youth who seemed half asleep, and a little later, creaking more loudly, it bore them slowly upward to the top of the house.

“I feel as if I were taking my life in my hands whenever I come here,” observed Mrs. Fowler, in the tone of dispassionate resignation with which she always discussed Patty and the surroundings amid which Patty lived.  Marching resolutely, though disapprovingly, down a long hall, she pressed a small bell at the side of a door, and stood, holding tightly to the bundle of curtains, while her expression of unnatural pleasantness grew almost painful in its determination.  Here, also, they waited some time, and when at last the door was opened by an agitated