t's been a
mean sort of day, hasn't it? I haven't set foot outside. I was already
feeling kind of blue and making up my mind to go to bed when Gaetano
came with your present."

There was an intimation in her glance that this event had not made the
world appear any rosier.

Both turned to look at the picture. Their hands loosened naturally; they
sat apart.

"Can't you see why I had to paint it, Mrs. Hawthorne?" he asked,
speaking eagerly, and as if pressing his defense.

"How could I endure to have that thing down-stairs stand as my idea, my
sole idea, of you? And how could I bear to make you a gift, a sole gift,
of a piece of work I do not respect? This may be worth no more,--I think
differently,--but it is at least the best I can produce. It has my
sanction. You, too, believe me, will prefer it to the other after a
while."

She shook her head a little disconsolately.

"The other you can, if you must, keep in your drawing-room to make an
agreeable spot of color," he went on, reversing their parts and trying
to induce in her a lighter humor; "it has that perfectly legitimate use.
In your drawing-room, you know, Auroretta, among the pictures of your
choosing, it does not, in our Italian idiom, altogether disappear. This
one you will keep out of sight, but will look at now and then, if you
please; and I quite trust you, with time, to recognize that it was
painted by some one who understood and honored you more than there was
any evidence of his doing when he perpetrated, for a joke, that
bonbon-box subject down-stairs."

Mrs. Hawthorne, with soft and saddened eyes fixed on the portrait, again
shook her head, sighing, "Poor thing!"

"Not at all!" he protested almost peevishly. "Please not to suggest by
pitying her that I have not represented there a fine, big, strong thing,
built to stand up under anything! I could slay, with pleasure, at any
time"--he diverged, carried away by a long-standing disgust,--"the
pestiferous asses who call my things morbid. I am too careful to keep
true to what I see. The difference between them--I mean the critics who
call me morbid--and myself, is in the degree of sight."

"Don't get excited, Geraldino!" she checked fumings which she did not
entirely understand. "What I meant was that looking at her has made me
think of all the things that have gone wrong with me in my whole life.
Don't you call that a tribute? You couldn't have painted this picture if
you hadn't suspected those th