my rubbers and I left with them, in a hard flurry
of snow. My room, after I reached it, seemed unusually cold. The
landlady's ancient relative sometimes juggles rather unsuccessfully with
the furnace, and she bemoaned before me, yesterday, the dreadful price
of coal. Hence, I went to work and warmed myself by writing the outline
of a tale with a plot unfolding itself during a hot wave of August. So
kindly is my imagination that, by midnight, I was wiping my brow and
sitting in my shirt-sleeves, till a sudden chill sent me to bed. This, I
am glad to say, had no serious consequence. I remember wondering about
the new picture Gordon would begin and, before I fell asleep, some trick
of my mind presented the thing to me. It was a queer composite of the
Murillo in the Louvre, of Raphael's Madonna of the Chair and of Frances
herself. From the canvas she was looking at me, with lids endowed with
motion and smiling eyes. There came to me, then, a dim recollection of
some strange Oriental belief, to the effect that on the Day of Judgment
sculptured and painted figures will crowd around their makers, begging
in vain for the souls that have been denied them. But I felt that
Gordon's "Mother and Child" will never thus clutch despairingly at their
painter's garment. The very soul of them is in that picture, already
endowed with a life that must endure till the canvas fritters itself
away into dust.

When I awoke, I found, with shamed dismay, that it was nearly ten
o'clock. On leaving my room I saw that the door opposite was wide open,
with Mrs. Milliken wrestling with a mattress. Frances was gone, bearing
her little Paul, through the still falling snow, to that studio where
Gordon would again spread some of her beauty and soul on the magic
cloth.

A few hours after, she returned in a taxicab.

"He insisted that I must take it," she explained. "He came downstairs
with me and told the man to charge it to him, at the club. The light was
very poor and he could do no painting. Spent the time just drawing and
rubbing the charcoal out again. I think he must be working very hard,
for he looks nervous and worried. No, I'm not hungry. He made me take
lunch at the studio, while he went out to the club. He--he seems very
impatient when I hesitate or don't wish to--to accept his kindnesses,
and becomes very gruff. He hardly said a word from the time when he
returned, till he bade me go home in the taxi. And--and now I must do
some sewing."