little
_abandon_, so little real joyousness."

"And yet," he murmured, "one of the greatest of our writers has
declared that the true spirit of Bohemianism is denied to your sex."

"He was probably right," she declared. "Bohemianism is the least
understood word ever coined. I do not think that I have the Bohemian
spirit at all."

He looked at her thoughtfully. She wore a plain black dress, reaching
almost to her throat--her small oval face, with the large brown eyes,
was colourless, delicately expressive, yet with something mysterious
in its Sphinx-like immobility. A woman hard to read, who seemed to
delight in keeping locked up behind that fascinating rigidity of
feature the intense sensibility which had been revealed to him, her
master, only in occasional and rare moments of enthusiasm. She
reminded him sometimes of the one holy and ineffable Madonna, at
others of Berode, the great courtezan of her day, who had sent kings
away from her doors, and had just announced her intention of ending
her life in a convent.

"I believe that you are right," he said softly. "It is the worst of
including in our vocabulary words which have no definite meaning,
perhaps I should say of which the meaning varies according to one's
personal point of view. You, for instance, you live, you are not
afraid to live. Yet you make our Bohemianism seem like a vulgar
thing."

She stirred gently in her chair.

"My friend," she said, "I have been your pupil for two years. You have
watched all the uncouth creations of my brain come sprawling out upon
the canvas, and besides, we have been companions. Yet the fact remains
that you do not understand me at all. No, not one little bit. It is
extraordinary."

"It is," he replied, "the one humiliation of my life. My opportunities
have been immense, and my failure utter. If I had been your companion
only, and not your master, I might very well have been content to
accept you for what you seem. But there have been times, Anna, when
your work has startled me. Ill-drawn, without method or sense of
proportion, you have put wonderful things on to canvas, have drawn
them out of yourself, notwithstanding your mechanical inefficiency.
God knows how you did it. You are utterly baffling."

She laughed at him easily and mirthfully.

"Dear friend," she said, "do not magnify me into a physiological
problem. I should only disappoint you terribly some day. I think I
know where I am puzzling you now----"

"The