you?"

"Yes."

"But why on earth should you do such a thing for me?"

She found no words to explain why.

"Nonsense," he continued; "you're a business woman now. Your father
will have to find somebody to cook for him and take the desk when he's
out at Grogan's. Don't worry; I'll fix it with him.... By the way,
Dulcie, supposing you sit down."

She found a chair and took the Prophet onto her lap.

"Now, this will be very convenient for me," he went on, inspecting her
with increasing satisfaction. "If I ever have any orders--any
sitters--you can have a vacation, of course. Otherwise, I'll always
have an interesting model at hand--I've got chests full of wonderful
costumes--genuine ones----" He fell silent, his eyes studying her.
Already he was planning half a dozen pictures, for he was just
beginning to perceive how adaptable the girl might be. And there was
about her that indefinable something which, when a painter discovers
it, interests him and arouses his intense artistic curiosity.

"You know," he said musingly, "you are something more than pretty,
Dulcie.... I could put you in eighteenth century clothes and you'd
look logical. Yes, and in seventeenth century clothes, too.... I could
do some amusing things with you in oriental garments.... A young
Herodiade ... Calypso ... Theodora.... She was a child, too, you know.
There's a portrait with bobbed hair--a young girl by Van Dyck.... You
know you are quite stimulating to me, Dulcie. You excite a painter's
imagination. It's rather odd," he added naively, "that I never
discovered you before; and I've known you over two years."

He had seated himself on the sofa while discoursing. Now he got up,
touched a bell twice. The Finnish maid, Selinda, with her high
cheek-bones, frosty blue eyes and colourless hair, appeared in cap and
apron.

"Selinda," he said, "take Miss Dulcie into my room. In a long, leather
Turkish box on the third shelf of my clothes closet is a silk and gold
costume and a lot of jade jewelry. Please put her into it."

So Dulcie Soane went away with her cat in her arms, beside the neat
and frosty-eyed Selinda; and Barres opened a portfolio of engravings,
where were gathered the lovely aristocrats of Van Dyck and Rubens and
Gainsborough and his contemporaries--a charmingly mixed company,
separated by centuries and frontiers, yet all characterised by a
common _something_--some inexplicable similarity which Barres
recognised without defining.

"