"Cora--a free woman, by God!" he observed, lighting another of his small
but deadly cigars.

Enid Blunt, who was sitting with Smith the sculptor and others at the
adjoining table, began slowly, and with an insolent drawl, reciting a
sonnet. She was black as the night. Even her hands looked swarthy.
There were yellow lights in her eyes. Her voice was guttural, and she
pronounced English with a strong German accent, although she had no
German blood in her veins and had never been in Germany. The little
Bolshevik, who had the face of a Russian peasant, candid eyes and a
squat figure, listened with an air of profound and somehow innocent
attention. She possessed neither morals nor manners, denied the
existence of God, and wished to pull the whole fabric of European
civilization to pieces. Her small brain was obsessed by a desire for
anarchy. She hated all laws and was really a calmly ferocious little
animal. But she looked like a creature of the fields, and had something
of the shepherdess in her round grey eyes. Thapoulos, a Levantine, who
had once been a courier in Athens, but who was now a rich banker with
a taste for Bohemia, kept one thin yellow hand on her shoulder as he
appeared to listen, with her, to the sonnet. Smith, with whom the little
Bolshevik was allied for the time, and who did in clay very much what
Garstin did on canvas, but more roughly and with less subtlety, looked
at the Levantine's hand with indifference. A large heavy man, with
square shoulders and short bowed legs, he scarcely knew why he had
anything to do with Anna, or remembered how they had come together. He
did not understand her at all, but she cooked certain Russian dishes
which he liked, and minded dirt as little as he did. Perhaps that lack
of minding had thrown them together. He did no know; nobody knew or
cared.

"Well, I'm a free woman," said Miss Van Tuyn, in answer to Garstin's
exclamation about Cora. "But you've never bothered to paint me."

She spoke with a touch of irritation. Somehow things seemed to be going
vaguely wrong for her to-night.

"I suppose I am not near enough to the gutter yet," she added.

"You're too much of the out-of-door type for me," said Garstin, looking
at her with almost fierce attention. "There isn't a line about you
except now and then in your forehead just above the nose. And even that
only comes from bad temper."

"Really, Dick," said Miss Van Tuyn, "you are absurd. It's putting your
art into a st