“Why the smile?” she said, quickly.

“Why?  Oh, I don’t know.  A comparison.  I suppose you people really are artists.  Mind you, I don’t mean you.  I’m not talking about you.  If it were you—­well, I shouldn’t talk about it.”

For the first moment in all their conversation of that evening, she looked ill-at-ease.  A cloud passed over the sun of her self-assurance.  It seemed, on the instant, to turn her eyes from blue to grey.

“What do you mean by—­a comparison?” she inquired, “and saying we’re artists?  Artists at what?  I believe you like to talk in riddles.  That’s another thing too that ’ud be in your favour.  People ’ud think you so awfully clever.  But what do you mean by comparison?”

He blew through his pipe, set it burning comfortably—­took his favourite seat on the table with his legs swinging like a schoolboy’s.

“A comparison—­I mean a comparison between the women of your set, and the women who toil at the same job in the streets of London.”

“Yes, but you said that when you looked at me, when you smiled while I was lighting the cigarette.”  The words hurried out of her lips, dropping metallically with a hard sound on his ears.

“I know, but I told you I didn’t refer to you.  Good God!” He gripped the table.  “Do you think I could think about you like that?  Look here, it’s no good having this nonsense; I won’t say another word if you think I am.”

“Very well; all right.  But tell me, at any rate, why you said it when you looked at me.”

“Because you’re made-up—­made-up to perfection.  I should never have seen it if I hadn’t held the match up to your face.  And there’s the difference—­there’s the comparison.  The women in your set are artists.  There’s all the difference in a Sargent and a man with half a dozen coloured chalks on the pavement, between them and the women you’ll find in Piccadilly at night.  But they’re both workers in the same dignified profession.  When you think of the way those poor wretches shove on their rouge—­a little silk bag turned inside out with eider-down on it and rouge powder on that, then the whole thing jammed on to the face before a mirror in one of Swan & Edgar’s shop windows; any night you can see ’em doing it—­and then look at a society woman done up, with a maid in attendance and a mirror lighted up, as if it were an actor’s dressing-table—­my heavens, you’re liable to make a comparison then.”

Dolly shuddered at the picture.  “I think you’ve got a loathsome mind, Jack,” she said with conviction.

“Of course you do, and you’re quite right.  It is a loathsome idea to think that a man of the type of Sargent is of the same noble profession as the pavement artist.  You can only disinfect its loathsomeness in a degree by assuring people that they don’t work in the same street.  But it always is loathsome in this country to see facts as they really are, and when you know of society women who send nude portraits of themselves—­”