igious masses and networks.

He felt he could not endure it a day longer. There must be a thorough
physical cleansing at once. And he must return to the luxury of a daily
bed-maker. This preoccupation with household things took off the keenest
edge of one's first energy and enthusiasm; he must reserve himself
jealously for his high calling.

As he sipped his coffee he mused over the little financial difficulties
that immediately beset him. Now that at last he had a valid ground for
appealing to Mary, he felt reluctant; anxious to bring her only the
sense of his success without alloy. He might explain the situation to
Mr. Robinson, and ask for money in advance; but that seemed as impolitic
as it was repugnant in this new rapture of fine upstanding dignity.
Payment of the quarter's rent that was already due could be easily
deferred--for the bare humiliation of making the request. But he needed
something for equipment, and must face the sacrifice of some of the
older pictures to which he had clung so long, accepting any sum in
exchange, if only shillings.

He still felt no disposition to invest the accident that had turned the
tide for him with any touch of superstition or romance. He regarded the
whole matter in the same dry light as at his first acceptance of it the
evening before. He had sat waiting for clients, and at last they had
turned up. But he did not at all dislike the Robinsons: they were very
much better than the great run of their class--they had evidently
ideals, and aspired to a higher degree of refinement than they as yet
possessed, or, perhaps, were capable of possessing. They were neither
smug nor self-satisfied, and, in giving him this work, they had avoided
indulging in any semblance of bourgeois patronage, whereas other people
of their class, even if well meaning, might easily have been gross and
intolerable.

He had studied his sitter pretty closely. The profile, as is not
unfrequently the case with "plain" women, had a curious individual
interest. He felt it offered scope for "construction," and he could
import subtly into the drawing a certain distinguished sentiment that
was not really in the original, though somehow it might easily have been
there, and, in moments of enthusiasm on the part of the observer, might
even be conceived to be there. Yes, the profile was undoubtedly the
thing: that way, too, the great coil of hair could be handled the more
effectively. Indeed, it seemed to him that,