By and by we plunged into a dark hallway, climbed a long, unsavoury, corkscrew staircase, and knocked at a door.  A gruff voice having answered, ‘’Trez!’ we entered Chalks’s bare, bleak, paint-smelling studio.  He was working (from a lay-figure) with his back towards us; and he went on working for a minute or two after our arrival, without speaking.  Then he demanded, in a sort of grunt, ’Eh bien, qu’est ce que c’est?’ always without pausing in his work or looking round.  Nina gave two little ahems, tense with suppressed mirth; and slowly, indifferently, Chalks turned an absent-minded face in our direction.  But, next instant, there was a shout—­a rush—­a confusion of forms in the middle of the floor—­and I realised that I was not the only one to be honoured by a kiss and an embrace.  ’Oh, you’re covering me with paint,’ Nina protested suddenly; and indeed he had forgotten to drop his brush and palette, and great dabs of colour were clinging to her cloak.  While he was doing penance, scrubbing the garment with rags soaked in turpentine, he kept shaking his head, and murmuring, from time to time, as he glanced up at her, ‘Well, I’ll be dumned.’

‘It’s very nice and polite of you, Chalks,’ she said, by and by, ’a very graceful concession to my sex.  But, if you think it would relieve you once for all, you have my full permission to pronounce it —­amned.’

Chalks did no more work that afternoon; and that evening quite twenty of us dined at Madame Chanve’s; and it was almost like old times.

VIII.

‘Oh, yes,’ she explained to me afterwards, ’my uncle is a good man.  My aunt and cousins are very good women.  But for me, to live with them—­pas possible, mon cher.  Their thoughts were not my thoughts, we could not speak the same language.  They disapproved of me unutterably.  They suffered agonies, poor things.  Oh, they were very kind, very patient.  But—!  My gods were their devils.  My father—­my great, grand, splendid father—­was “poor Alfred,” “poor uncle Alfred.”  Que voulez-vous?  And then—­the life, the society!  The parishioners—­the people who came to tea—­the houses where we sometimes dined!  Are you interested in crops?  In the preservation of game?  In the diseases of cattle?  Olala! (C’est bien le cas de s’en servir, de cette expression-la.) Olala, lala!  And then—­have you ever been homesick?  Oh, I longed, I pined, for Paris, as one suffocating would long, would die, for air.  Enfin, I could not stand it any longer.  They thought it wicked to smoke cigarettes.  My poor aunt—­when she smelt cigarette-smoke in my bed-room!  Oh, her face!  I had to sneak away, behind the shrubbery at the end of the garden, for stealthy whiffs.  And it was impossible to get French tobacco.  At last I took the bull by the horns, and fled.  It will have been a terrible shock for them.  But better one good blow than endless little ones; better a lump-sum than instalments with interest.’