cribed it. When he came into
his kingdom he intended to have such a garden.

"You'll let me have a peep at it sometimes, won't you?" said Jane.

"Of course," said Paul.

The lack of enthusiasm in his tone chilled the girl's heart. But she
did not protest. In these days, in spite of occasional outspokenness
she was still a humble little girl worshipping her brilliant companion
from afar.

"How often could I come?" she asked.

"That," said he, in his boyish pashadom, "would depend on how good you
were."

Obedient to the thought processes of her sex, she made a bee line to
the particular.

"Oh, Paul, I hope you're not angry."

"At what?"

"At what I said about your being a model."

"Not a bit," said he. "If I hadn't wanted to know your opinion, I
wouldn't have asked you."

She brightened. "You really wanted to know what I thought?"

"Naturally," said Paul. "You're the most commonsense girl I've ever
met."

Paul walked soberly home. Jane accompanied him--on wings.

On Monday Paul went to the Life School and stripped with a heavy heart.
Jane was right. It was not a man's job. The fact, too, of his doing it
lowered him in her esteem, and though he had no romantic thoughts
whatever with regard to Jane, he enjoyed being Lord Paramount in her
eyes. He went into the studio and took up his pose; and as he stood on
the model throne, conspicuous, glaring, the one startling central
object, Higgins's "How beastly!" came like a material echo and smote
him in the face. He felt like Adam when he first proceeded to his
primitive tailoring. A wave of shame ran through him. He looked around
the great silent room, at the rows of students, each in front of an
easel, using his naked body for their purposes. A phrase flashed across
his mind--in three years his reading had brought vocabulary--they were
using his physical body for their spiritual purposes. For the moment he
hated them all fiercely. They were a band of vampires. Habit and
discipline alone saved him from breaking his pose and fleeing headlong.
But there he was fixed, like marble, in an athlete's attitude, showing
rippling muscles of neck and chest and arms and thighs all developed by
the gymnasium into the perfection of Greek beauty, and all useless,
more useless even, as far as the world's work was concerned, than the
muscles of a racehorse. There he was fixed, with outstretched limbs and
strained loins, a human being far more alive than the peering,
measuring