umped to her
feet.

"Sorry--you're sorry? YOU'RE sorry? Why, what earthly difference will it
make to YOU?" She drew back a few steps and lifted her slender arms from
her sides. "Look at me--see how I look--how I'm going to look! YOU
won't hate yourself more and more every morning when you get up and see
yourself in the glass! YOUR life's going on just as usual! But what's
mine going to be for months and months? And just as I'd been to all this
bother--fagging myself to death about all these things--" her tragic
gesture swept the disordered room--"just as I thought I was going home
to enjoy myself, and look nice, and see people again, and have a little
pleasure after all our worries--" She dropped back on the sofa with
another burst of tears. "For all the good this rubbish will do me now! I
loathe the very sight of it!" she sobbed with her face in her hands.

XIV

It was one of the distinctions of Mr. Claud Walsingham Popple that his
studio was never too much encumbered with the attributes of his art
to permit the installing, in one of its cushioned corners, of an
elaborately furnished tea-table flanked by the most varied seductions
in sandwiches and pastry.

Mr. Popple, like all great men, had at first had his ups and downs; but
his reputation had been permanently established by the verdict of a
wealthy patron who, returning from an excursion into other fields of
portraiture, had given it as the final fruit of his experience that
Popple was the only man who could "do pearls." To sitters for whom this
was of the first consequence it was another of the artist's merits
that he always subordinated art to elegance, in life as well as in his
portraits. The "messy" element of production was no more visible in
his expensively screened and tapestried studio than its results were
perceptible in his painting; and it was often said, in praise of his
work, that he was the only artist who kept his studio tidy enough for a
lady to sit to him in a new dress.

Mr. Popple, in fact, held that the personality of the artist should at
all times be dissembled behind that of the man. It was his opinion that
the essence of good-breeding lay in tossing off a picture as easily as
you lit a cigarette. Ralph Marvell had once said of him that when he
began a portrait he always turned back his cuffs and said: "Ladies
and gentlemen, you can see there's absolutely nothing here," and Mrs.
Fairford supplemented the description by defining his p