Ten minutes later the centre panel of his door displayed a card bearing these words:  “At home only after six o’clock.”

“I wonder I never thought of doing this before,” he reflected, as he lit a cigarette and strolled off to a neighboring restaurant; “I am always out by that hour.”

* * * * *

Several weeks elapsed before he saw Miss Price again, for he promptly forgot his promise to visit her studio and inspect her work.  His own work was very absorbing just then, and the short winter days all too brief for its accomplishment.  He was struggling to complete the large canvas that Miss Snell had so volubly admired during her visit, and it really seemed to be progressing.  But the weather changed suddenly from frost to thaw, and he woke one morning to find little runnels of dirty water coursing down his window and dismally dripping into the muddy street below.  It made him feel blue, and his big picture, which had seemed so promising the day before, looked hopelessly bad in this new mood.  So he determined to take a day off, and, after his coffee, strolled out into the Luxembourg Gardens.  There the statues were green with mouldy dampness, and the paths had somewhat the consistency of very thin oatmeal porridge.  Suddenly the sun came out brightly, and he found a partially dry bench, where he sat down to brood upon the utter worthlessness of things in general and the Luxembourg statuary in particular.  The sunny facade of the palace glittered in the brightness.  One of his own pictures hung in its gallery.  “It is bad,” he said to himself, “hopelessly bad,” and he gloomily felt the strongest proof of its worthlessness was its popularity with the public.  He would probably go on thinking this until the weather or his mood changed.

As his eyes strayed from the palace, he glanced up a long vista between leafless trees and muddy grass-plats.  A familiar figure in a battered straw hat and scanty green cloak was advancing in his direction; the wind, blowing back the fringe of disfiguring short hair, disclosed a pure unbroken line of delicate profile, strangely simple, and recalling the profiles in Botticelli’s lovely fresco in the Louvre.  Miss Price, for it was she, carried a painting-box, and under one arm a stretcher that gave her infinite trouble whenever the wind caught it.  As she passed, the Painter half started up to join her, but she gave him such a cold nod that his intention was nipped in the bud.  He felt snubbed, and sank back on his bench, taking a malicious pleasure in observing that, womanlike, she ploughed through all the deepest puddles in her path, making great splashes about the hem of her skirt, that fluttered out behind her as she walked, for her hands were filled, and she had no means of holding it up.

The Painter resented his snubbing.  He was used to the most humble deference from the art students of the quarter, who hung upon his slightest word, and were grateful for every stray crumb of his attention.