“She talked as if they were poor; poo’ she called it.”

“Yes, how queerly she pronounced,” said Mrs. Leighton.  “Well, I ought to have told them that I required the first week in advance.”

“Mamma!  If that’s the way you’re going to act!”

“Oh, of course, I couldn’t, after he wouldn’t let her bargain for the rooms.  I didn’t like that.”

“I did.  And you can see that they were perfect ladies; or at least one of them.”  Alma laughed at herself, but her mother did not notice.

“Their being ladies won’t help if they’ve got no money.  It ’ll make it all the worse.”

“Very well, then; we have no money, either.  We’re a match for them any day there.  We can show them that two can play at that game.”

III.

Arnus Beaton’s studio looked at first glance like many other painters’ studios.  A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil and water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with its head on one side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress dropped before it; dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor; canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes:  these features one might notice anywhere.  But, besides, there was a bookcase with an unusual number of books in it, and there was an open colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned, with foreign periodicals—­French and English—­littering its leaf, and some pages of manuscript scattered among them.  Above all, there was a sculptor’s revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling, with an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the head of the old man who sat on the platform beside it.

Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have more than one.  But they are apparently immensely interested as well as distracted by them.  When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed, up to a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point, he would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist, and supremely a colorist.  At the certain point in either art he was apt to break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other.  In these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very striking, very original, very chic, very everything but habitable.  It was in this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had at first approached rather slightingly