The months slipped by golden with fulfilment.  News of the beautiful boy model went the round of the studios.  Those were simpler times (although not so very long ago) in British art than the present, and the pretty picture was still in vogue.  As Mr. Rowlatt, the young architect, had foretold, Paul had no difficulty in obtaining work.  Indeed, it was fatally easy.  Mr. Cyrus Rowlatt, R.A., had launched him.  Being fabulously paid, he thought his new profession the most aristocratic calling in the world.  In a remarkably short time he was able to repay Barney Bill.  The day when he purchased the postal order was the proudest in his life.  The transaction gave him a princely feeling.  He alone of boys, by special virtue of his origin, was capable of such a thing.  Again, his welcome in the painting world confirmed him in the belief that he was a personage, born to great things.  Posed on the model throne, the object of the painter’s intense scrutiny, he swelled ingenuously with the conviction of his supreme importance.  The lazy luxury of the model’s life appealed to his sensuous temperament.  He loved the warmth, the artistic setting of the studios; the pictures, the oriental rugs, the bits of armour, the old brocade, the rich cushions.  If he had not been born to it, why had he not remained, like all ’the youth of Bludston, amid the filth and clatter of the factory?  He loved, too, to hear the studio talk, though at first he comprehended little of it.  The men and women for whom he sat possessed the same quality as his never-forgotten goddess and Lady Chudley and the young architect—­ a quality which he recognized keenly, but for which his limited vocabulary could find no definition.  Afterward he realized that it was refinement in manner and speech and person.  This quality he felt it essential to acquire.  Accordingly he played the young ape to those who aroused his admiration.

One day when Jane entered the back-parlour he sprang from his seat and advanced with outstretched hand to meet her:  “My dear Lady Jane, how good of you to come!  Do let me clear a chair for you.”

“What are you playing at?” asked Jane.

“That’s the way to receive a lady when she calls on you.

“Oh!” said Jane.

He practised on her each newly learned social accomplishment.  He minced his broad Lancashire, when he spoke to her, in such a way as to be grotesquely unintelligible.  By listening to conversations he learned many amazing social facts; among them that the gentry had a bath every morning of their lives.  This stirred his imagination to such a pitch that he commanded Jane to bring up the matutinal washtub to his bedroom.  By instinct refined he revelled in the resultant sensation of cleanliness.  He paid great attention to his attire, modelling himself, as far as he could, on young Rowlatt, the architect, on whom he occasionally called to report progress.  He bought such neckties and collars as Rowlatt wore and submitted them for Jane’s