own life, and can enter into your pursuits--you want companions who
can talk to you; go back to them, Arnold, as soon as you are tired of
coming here."

And yet his instinct was right which told him that the girl was not a
coquette. She had no thought--not the least thought--as yet that
anything was possible beyond the existing friendship. It was pleasant,
but Arnold would get tired of her, and go back to his own people. Then
he would remain in her memory as a study of character. This she did
not exactly formulate, but she had that feeling. Every woman makes a
study of character about every man in whom she becomes ever so little
interested. But we must not get conceited, my brothers, over this
fact. The converse, unhappily, does not hold true. Very few men ever
study the character of a woman at all. Either they fall in love with
her before they have had time to make more than a sketch, and do not
afterward pursue the subject, or they do not fall in love with her at
all; and in the latter case it hardly seems worth while to follow up a
first rough draft.

"Checkmate," said Lala Roy.

The game was finished and the evening over. "Would you like," he
said, another evening, "to see my studio, or do you consider my studio
outside myself?"

"I should very much like to see an artist's studio," she replied with
her usual frankness, leaving it an open question whether she would not
be equally pleased to see any other studio.

She came, however, accompanied by Lala Roy, who had never been in a
studio before, and indeed had never looked at a picture, except with
the contemptuous glance which the philosopher bestows upon the follies
of mankind. Yet he came, because Iris asked him. Arnold's studio is
one of the smallest of those in Tite Street. Of course it is built of
red brick, and of course it has a noble staircase and a beautiful
painting-room or studio proper all set about with bits of tapestry,
armor, pictures, and china, besides the tools and properties of the
craft. He had portfolios full of sketches; against the wall stood
pictures, finished and unfinished; on an easel was a half-painted
picture representing a group taken from a modern novel. Most painters
only draw scenes from two novels--the "Vicar of Wakefield" and "Don
Quixote;" but Arnold knew more. The central figure was a girl, quite
unfinished--in fact, barely sketched in.

Iris looked at everything with the interest which belongs to the new
and unexpected.