come in," she said. "It's cold, isn't it? Well, there's a nice
fire here for you. No, mother isn't here. She went down to New York.
I should think you might have found her at the apartment. Are you in
New York for long?"

She was gay, cheerful, genial, but remote. Cowperwood felt the
protective gap that lay between him and her. It had always been there.
He felt that, even though she might understand and like him, yet there
was something--convention, ambition, or some deficiency on his
part--that was keeping her from him, keeping her eternally distant.

He looked about the room, at the picture she was attempting (a
snow-scape, of a view down a slope), at the view itself which he
contemplated from the window, at some dancing sketches she had recently
executed and hung on the wall for the time being--lovely, short tunic
motives. He looked at her in her interesting and becoming painter's
apron. "Well, Berenice," he said, "always the artist first. It is
your world. You will never escape it. These things are beautiful." He
waved an ungloved hand in the direction of a choric line. "It wasn't
your mother I came to see, anyhow. It is you. I had such a curious
letter from her. She tells me you want to give up society and take to
teaching or something of that sort. I came because I wanted to talk to
you about that. Don't you think you are acting rather hastily?"

He spoke now as though there were some reason entirely disassociated
from himself that was impelling him to this interest in her.

Berenice, brush in hand, standing by her picture, gave him a look that
was cool, curious, defiant, equivocal.

"No, I don't think so," she replied, quietly. "You know how things
have been, so I may speak quite frankly. I know that mother's
intentions were always of the best."

Her mouth moved with the faintest touch of sadness. "Her heart, I am
afraid, is better than her head. As for your motives, I am satisfied
to believe that they have been of the best also. I know that they have
been, in fact--it would be ungenerous of me to suggest anything else."
(Cowperwood's fixed eyes, it seemed to her, had moved somewhere in
their deepest depths.) "Yet I don't feel we can go on as we have been
doing. We have no money of our own. Why shouldn't I do something?
What else can I really do?"

She paused, and Cowperwood gazed at her, quite still. In her informal,
bunchy painter's apron, and with her blue eyes looking out at him