ing his
ingredients, his artist's eyes aglow with the inward fire of
inspiration. Nancy called all the waitresses together and offered
them certain prizes and rewards for all the buttermilk, and prunes
and other health dishes that they were able to distribute among
ailing patrons,--with the result they were over assiduous at the
luncheon hour, and a red-headed young man with gold teeth made a
disturbance that it took both Hilda and Michael, who appeared
suddenly in his overalls from the upper regions where he was
constructing window-boxes, to quell. But these incidents were not
sufficiently significant to make the day in any way a memorable
one to Nancy. It took a telephone message from Collier Pratt,
requesting, nay demanding, her presence in his studio for the first
sitting on her portrait, to make the day stand out upon her calendar.

"Sheila is with me. Shall I bring her?" Nancy asked.

"No," Collier Pratt said uncompromisingly, "I am not a parent at this
hour. She would disturb me."

"What shall I wear?"

"What have you got on?"

"That blue crepe, made surplice,--the one you liked the other night."

"That's just what I want--Madonna blue. Can you get down here in
fifteen minutes?"

"Yes, I'll send Michael up-town with Sheila."

The bare, ramshackle studio on Washington Square shocked her,--it was
so comfortless, so dingy; but the canvases on the walls, set up
against the wainscoting, stacked on every available chair, gave her a
new and almost appalling impression of his personality, and the
peculiar poignant power of him. She could not appraise them, or get
any real sense of their quality apart from the astounding revelation
of the man behind the work.

"They're wonderful!" she gasped, but "You're wonderful" were the words
she stifled on her lips.

He painted till the light failed him.

"It's this diffused glow,--this gentle, faded afternoon light that I
want," he said. "I want you to emerge from your background as if you
had bloomed out of it that very moment. Oh! I've got you at your hour,
you know! The prescient maternal--that's what I want. The conscious
moment when a woman becomes aware that she is potentially a mother.
Sheila's done that for you. She's brought it out in you. It was ready,
it was waiting there before, but now it's come. It's wonderful!"

"Yes," Nancy said, "it's--it's come."

"It hasn't been done, you know. It's a modern conception, of course;
but they all do the thing realiz