ke a wild savage's."

Miss Eulalie had called Bella in once to mend a hole in her stocking
"really too bad for school."

"She should have gone into the Women's Exchange," suggested her cousin,
"and employed some one who was out of orders for chicken pies or dolls!"

* * * * *

That night, under the gas jet and its blue and ghastly light, Fairfax
tried to write to his mother, began his letter and left it as he began.
"My dearest Mother...." She had told him little of his kinspeople, the
sisters had never been friends. Nevertheless, he quite understood that,
whatever she might have thought of the eccentricities of his uncle, this
welcome to her boy would cut her cruelly. She had fully expected him to
be a guest at the Carews.

"My dearest Mother...." He began to draw idly on the page. A spray of
jasmine uncurled its leaves beneath his hand. Across his shoulders he
felt the coldness of the room where he sat. A few more hurried strokes
and Fairfax had indicated on the page before him a child's head--an
upturned face. As he rounded the chin, Antony saw that the sketch would
be likely to charm him, and he was tired out and cold. He threw down his
pen, dragged out his valise, opened it, took out his things and prepared
for his first night's rest in the city of his unfriendly kinsmen.

CHAPTER VI

If it had been only spring, or any season less brutal than this winter,
whose severity met him at times with a fresh rebuff and a fresh
surprise--if it had been spring, Antony would have procrastinated, hung
back, unaccustomed as he was to taking quick, decisive action, but the
ugliness of the surroundings at Miss Whitcomb's and the bitter winter
weather forced him to a decision. In the three following days he visited
every one of the few studios that existed at that period in New York.
What were his plans? What were his ideas? But, when he came face to face
with the reality of the matter-of-fact question, he had no plans.
Idealistic, impractical, untried and unschooled, he faced the fact that
he had no plan or idea whatsoever of how to forge his life: he never had
had any and his mother had given him no advice. He wanted to work at
art, but how and where he did not know. Some of the studios could use
models--Fairfax burned at the thought. He could not study as a pupil and
live on air. No one wanted practical workmen.

The man he most wanted to see was Gunner Cedersholm. He had fallen in