ualified agreement would be too dangerous a proceeding with a person of
Clarissa's unhumorous earnestness.

"I said so when I first saw it," cried Clarissa triumphantly. "I said,
'my god, George, you've only given us half of her!'"

Michael took a furtive glance at the portrait to see whether his initial
impression of a full-length study had been correct, and, finding that it
was, concluded Clarissa referred to some metaphysical conception of her
own.

From the amplification of this he edged away by drawing attention to the
splendor of the moon.

"I know what you mean," said Clarissa. "But I like sunshine effects
best."

"I wasn't really thinking about painting at that moment," Michael
observed, without remembering that all his mind was supposed to be
occupied with it.

"You know _you're_ very paintable," Clarissa went on. "I suppose you've
sat to heaps of people. All the same, I wish you'd let _me_ paint you. I
should like to bring out an aspect I daresay lots of people have never
noticed."

Michael was not proof against this attack, and, despising the while his
weak vanity, asked Clarissa what was the aspect.

"You're very passionate, aren't you?" she said, shaking Michael's
temperament in the thermometer of her thought.

"No; rather the reverse," said Michael, as he irritably visualized
himself in a tiger-skin careering across one of Clarissa's florid
canvases.

"All the same, I wish you _would_ sit for me," persisted Clarissa.

Michael made up his mind he must speak seriously to Stella about this
friend of hers. It was really very unfair to involve him in this way
with a provocative young paintress who, however clever she might be, was
most obviously unsympathetic to him. What a pity Maurice Avery was not
here! He would so enjoy skating on the thin ice of her thought. Yet ice
was scarcely an appropriate metaphor to use in connection with her.
There should be some parallel with strawberries to illustrate his notion
of Clarissa, who was after all with her precious aspirations and
constructive fingers a creature of the sun. Yet it was strange and
rather depressing to think that English girls could never get any nearer
to the Maenad than the evocation of the image of a farouche dairymaid.

All the time that Michael had been postulating these conclusions to
himself, he had been mechanically shaking his head to Clarissa's
request. "What can you be thinking about?" she asked, and at the moment
mere inquisit