for I
really liked to hear her; she looked so pretty when she talked. It was
all so touching and so amusing.

I am not sure that she had read Dante, but if she had she no doubt saw
herself something in the guise of a Beatrice stooping from heights of
wisdom to support my straying, faltering footsteps. She brought me one
day a feeble little volume of third-rate verse, with a page turned down
at a passage she requested me to read. The badly constructed lines,
their grandiloquent sentimentality, jarred on me; but in them I
perceived a complimentary application that might imply much
encouragement. Miss Jones evidently thought that I was rising step by
step, and put this cordial to my lips. I thanked her very
earnestly--feeling positively shrivelled--and then, turning from the
subject with a haste I hoped she might impute to modesty--and indeed
modesty of a certain humiliating kind did form part of it--I told her
that Manon would only require another sitting after that day.

"Ah! is it finished, then?"

She went to look at it.

"_Is_ my left eye as indistinct as that?" she asked, playfully. "Can't
you see my eyelashes? That is impressionism, I suppose." I felt my
forehead growing hot.

"The left eye is in shadow," I observed.

"I am afraid shadows are convenient sometimes, aren't they? I like just
a plain, straight-forward telling of the truth, with no green paint over
it! You accept a little well-meant teasing, don't you?"

I accepted it as I had to accept her various revelations of stupefying
obtuseness, and smiled over the sandy mouthful.

"Yes," she pursued, carefully looking up and down the canvas--certainly
a new sign of interest in me and my work--"you will need quite two days
to finish it; the hands especially, they are rather sketchy about the
finger-tips." She might have been a genial old professor giving me
advice mingled with the good-humored _raillerie_ of superiority. The
hands were finished; but I kept a cowardly silence.

"And the dress must be a good bit more distinctly outlined; I can't see
_where_ it goes on this side; and then the details of the background--I
can hardly tell what those dashes and splashes on the dressing-table are
supposed to represent."

"I think you are standing a little too near the canvas," I said, in a
voice which I strove to free from a tone of patient long-suffering. "If
you go farther away, you will get the effect of the _ensemble_."

"No, no!" she laughed; she evide