aintance."

Meanwhile Miss Maitland and her companion had crossed the Common, and
when they came to Boylston Street the shop windows were all alit and
the street lamps began to shine. It was the close of a cool September
day, and a sharp wind whipped the skirt of Pelgram's frock coat around
his legs and flecked the blood into the girl's cheeks as she stepped
briskly westward, swinging along easily while her rather stout and soft
escort, patting the walk with his cane, kept up with some little
difficulty. As often as he dared, the artist glanced at her, and with
hope kindled by gratitude, he thought her never so attractive. And no
matter what might be said of the eccentricity of his artistic taste in
pursuit of the ideal, his selection of the real was indisputably sound;
Miss Maitland was well worth the admiration of any man.

As they came to Portland Street, waiting at the crossing for a
motor-car to pass, Pelgram quite suddenly said, "I wish I could paint
you here and just as you are looking now."

The girl flushed a little. The compliment was conventional enough, but
there was a tone in his voice that she had never heard before and that
carried its meaning clearly.

"Thank you. Is it because the atmosphere and background would be so
ugly--wind and iron and dead leaves and raw brick walls and hideous
advertising signs--and I should seem attractive by comparison?"

Her companion looked thoughtfully ahead, as they crossed the street and
went on.

"No, not that," he said, more gravely than usual. "You don't need any
comparison, but all this isn't really so bad. Perhaps the things you
mention are ugly in themselves, but a certain combination of them
caught at a certain moment can well be worthy of a painting, and I
think we have that moment now. Beauty makes a more pleasant model for
the artist--that is why I would have liked you in the foreground--but
beauty is not the only province of art. If it were, no painter, for
example, would find anything to occupy him in the foul stream that
washes the London wharves--as some critic has said. Yet a great many
beautiful pictures have come from the London wharves, and one, at
least, could come from Boylston Street."

The girl was interested. Behind his intolerable pastels and nuances
and frock coats and superficial pose the man actually had ideas; it was
a pity they showed so seldom. And she wished he would confine himself
to the abstract. She could tolerate hi