“You know very well,” she answered, “that I couldn’t do anything in that way worth the time I should waste on it.  Don’t talk of it, please.  I suppose my aunt has been asking you to say this, but it’s no use.  I’m sorry it’s no use, she wishes it so much; but I’m not sorry otherwise.  You can find the pleasure at least of doing good work in it; but I couldn’t find anything in it but a barren amusement.  Mr. Wetmore is right; for me, it’s like enjoying an opera, or a ball.”

“That’s one of Wetmore’s phrases.  He’d sacrifice anything to them.”

She put aside the whole subject with a look.  “You were not at Mr. Dryfoos’s the other day.  Have you seen them, any of them, lately?”

“I haven’t been there for some time, no,” said Beaton, evasively.  But he thought if he was to get on to anything, he had better be candid.  “Mr. Dryfoos was at my studio this morning.  He’s got a queer notion.  He wants me to paint his son’s portrait.”

She started.  “And will you—­”

“No, I couldn’t do such a thing.  It isn’t in my way.  I told him so.  His son had a beautiful face an antique profile; a sort of early Christian type; but I’m too much of a pagan for that sort of thing.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Beaton continued, not quite liking her assent after he had invited it.  He had his pride in being a pagan, a Greek, but it failed him in her presence, now; and he wished that she had protested he was none.  “He was a singular creature; a kind of survival; an exile in our time and place.  I don’t know:  we don’t quite expect a saint to be rustic; but with all his goodness Conrad Dryfoos was a country person.  If he were not dying for a cause you could imagine him milking.”  Beaton intended a contempt that came from the bitterness of having himself once milked the family cow.

His contempt did not reach Miss Vance.  “He died for a cause,” she said.  “The holiest.”

“Of labor?”

“Of peace.  He was there to persuade the strikers to be quiet and go home.”

“I haven’t been quite sure,” said Beaton.  “But in any case he had no business there.  The police were on hand to do the persuading.”

“I can’t let you talk so!” cried the girl.  “It’s shocking!  Oh, I know it’s the way people talk, and the worst is that in the sight of the world it’s the right way.  But the blessing on the peacemakers is not for the policemen with their clubs.”

Beaton saw that she was nervous; he made his reflection that she was altogether too far gone in good works for the fine arts to reach her; he began to think how he could turn her primitive Christianity to the account of his modern heathenism.  He had no deeper design than to get flattered back into his own favor far enough to find courage for some sort of decisive step.  In his heart he was trying to will whether he should or should not go back to Dryfoos’s house.  It could not be from the caprice that had formerly taken him; it must be from a definite