Vergniaud laughed as he looked,—­he knew the pictured dignitary well.  The smooth countenance, the little eyes comfortably sunken in small rolls of fat, the smug smiling lips, the gross neck and heavy jaw,—­marks of high feeding and prosperous living,—­and above all the perfectly self-satisfied and mock-pious air of the man,—­these points were given with the firm touch of a master’s brush, and the Abbe, after studying the picture closely, turned to Angela with a light yet deferential bow.

“Chere Sovrani, you are stronger than ever!  Surely you have improved much since you were last in Paris?  Your strokes are firmer, your grasp is bolder.  Have your French confreres seen your work this year?”

“No,” replied Angela, “I am resolved they shall see nothing till my picture is finished.”

“May one ask why?”

A flash of disdain passed over the girl’s face.

“For a very simple reason!  They take my ideas and use them,—­and then, when my work is produced they say it is I who have copied from them, and that women have no imagination!  I have been cheated once or twice in that way,—­this time no one has any idea what I am doing.”

“No one?  Not even Signer Varillo?”

“No,” said Angela, smiling a little, “Not even Signor Varillo.  I want to surprise him.”

“In what way?” asked the Cardinal, rousing himself from his pensive reverie.

Angela blushed.

“By proving that perhaps, after all, a woman can do a great thing in art,—­a really great thing!” she said, “Designed greatly, and greatly executed.”

“Does he not admit that, knowing you?” asked Aubrey Leigh suggestively.

“Oh, he is most kind and sympathetic to me in my work,” explained Angela quickly, vexed to think that she had perhaps implied some little point that was not quite in her beloved one’s favour.  “But he is like most men,—­they have a preconceived idea of women, and of what their place should be in the world—­”

“Unchanged since the early phases of civilization, when women were something less valuable than cattle?” said Leigh smiling.

“Oh, the cattle idea is not exploded, by any means!” put in Vergniaud.  “In Germany and Switzerland, for example, look at the women who are ground down to toil and hardship there!  The cows are infinitely prettier and more preferable, and lead much pleasanter lives.  And the men for whom these poor wretched women work, lounge about in cafes all day, smoking and playing dominoes.  The barbaric arrangement that a woman should be a man’s drudge and chattel is quite satisfactory, I think, to the majority of our sex.  It is certainly an odd condition of things that the mothers of men should suffer most from man’s cruelty.  But it is the work of an all-wise Providence, no doubt; and you, Mr. Leigh, will swear that it is all right!”