ful
women?"

"Ah you've others then?" she extravagantly groaned.

"They're not so kind as you, I confess."

"I'll buy it from you--what you're doing: I'll pay you well when it's
done," said the girl. "I've got money now. I make it, you know--a good
lot of it. It's too delightful after scraping and starving. Try it and
you'll see. Give up the base, bad world."

"But isn't it supposed to be the base, bad world that pays?"

"Precisely; make it pay without mercy--knock it silly, squeeze it dry.
That's what it's meant for--to pay for art. Ah if it wasn't for that!
I'll bring you a quantity of photographs to-morrow--you must let me come
back to-morrow: it's so amusing to have them, by the hundred, all for
nothing, to give away. That's what takes mamma most: she can't get over
it. That's luxury and glory; even at Castle Nugent they didn't do that.
People used to sketch me, but not so much as mamma _veut bien le dire_;
and in all my life I never had but one poor little carte-de-visite, when
I was sixteen, in a plaid frock, with the banks of a river, at three
francs the dozen."

XXVI

It was success, the member for Harsh felt, that had made her finer--the
full possession of her talent and the sense of the recognition of it.
There was an intimation in her presence (if he had given his mind to it)
that for him too the same cause would produce the same effect--that is
would show him how being launched in the practice of an art makes
strange and prompt revelations. Nick felt clumsy beside a person who
manifestly, now, had such an extraordinary familiarity with the esthetic
point of view. He remembered too the clumsiness that had been in his
visitor--something silly and shabby, pert rather than proper, and of
quite another value than her actual smartness, as London people would
call it, her well-appointedness and her evident command of more than one
manner. Handsome as she had been the year before, she had suggested
sordid lodgings, bread and butter, heavy tragedy and tears; and if then
she was an ill-dressed girl with thick hair who wanted to be an actress,
she was already in these few weeks a performer who could even produce an
impression of not performing. She showed what a light hand she could
have, forbore to startle and looked as well, for unprofessional life, as
Julia: which was only the perfection of her professional character.

This function came out much in her talk, for there were many little
bursts of co