Cora laughed, and was silent.  The Painter blessed her for not being talkative; her nasal voice irritated him, although her beautiful features were a constant delight.

Miss Snell had succeeded in permanently eliminating the disfiguring bang, and her charming profile was left unmarred.

“I want to paint you just as you are,” he said, and noticing that she looked rather disdainfully at her shabby black cashmere, added, “The black of your dress could not be better.”

“We thought,” said Miss Snell, deprecatingly, “that you might like a costume.  We could easily arrange one.”

“Not in the least necessary,” said the Painter.  “I have set my heart on painting her just as she is.”

The girls were disappointed in his want of taste.  They had had visions of a creation in which two Liberty scarfs and a velveteen table cover were combined in a felicitous harmony of color.

“When can I have the first sitting?” he asked.

“Tuesday, I think,” said Miss Snell, reflectively.

“Heavens!” thought the Painter.  “Is Miss Snell coming with her?” And the possibility kept him in a state of nervousness until Tuesday afternoon, when Cora appeared, accompanied by the inevitable Miss Snell.

It turned out, however, that the latter could not stay.  She would call for Cora later; just now her afternoons were occupied.  She was doing a pastel portrait in the Champs Elysees quarter, so she reluctantly left, to the Painter’s great relief.

He did not make himself very agreeable during the sittings which followed.  He was apt to get absorbed in his work and to forget to say anything.  Then Miss Snell would appear to fetch her friend, and he would apologize for being so dull, and Cora would remark that she enjoyed sitting quietly, it rested her after the noise and confusion at Julian’s.

“If she talked much I could not paint her, her voice is so irritating,” he confided to a friend who was curious and asked all sorts of questions about his new sitter.

The work went well but slowly, for Cora sat only twice a week.  She felt obliged to devote the rest of her time to study, as she was living on the prize fund, and she even had qualms of conscience about the two afternoons she gave up to the sittings.

During all this time Miss Snell continued to weave chapters of romance about Cora and the Painter, and the girls talked things over after each sitting when they were alone together.

Spring had appeared very early in the year, and the public gardens and boulevards were richly green.  Chestnut-trees blossomed and gaudy flower-beds bloomed in every square.  The Salons opened, and were thronged with an enthusiastic public, although the papers as usual denounced them as being the poorest exhibitions ever given.

The Painter had sent nothing, being completely absorbed in finishing Cora’s portrait, to the utter exclusion of everything else.