"A plunge into study, life classes, models, talks with my fellow artists, and a hunt for a cheap studio."
"It makes life seem very complicated after this lovely simplicity, doesn't it? We are so free here, and it is so delightful to be able to wear your old clothes all the time. Now I shall have to wrestle with the problem of a winter outfit, and of how to make the best appearance on the least outlay. I can manage very well, though," she added quickly. "I'm not wild about clothes, and yet I don't believe I ever look really dowdy. Did I look dowdy that first time you saw me, so long, so long ago?"
"You never looked anything but adorably lovely," returned Kenneth with enthusiasm.
She lifted a protesting hand. "None of that."
"I thought you the most graceful girl I ever saw," Kenneth went on. "I remember thinking I'd like to make a study of you as you sat there."
"Where? That first time, was it?"
"Yes, at Madge McAllister's tea, where I had gone with my sister. You were sitting on a divan in one of your unconsciously picturesque poses. You wore a big black hat and some sort of pale yellow thing around your neck. Your dress was a pastel green, I remember. It was a charming study in color, and I would like to have painted you then and there."
"You never said so."
"I didn't dare then. I hoped to see you again and I had a sense of being defrauded when you suddenly disappeared and I couldn't find you, though I went through all the rooms. I remember that day when I met you on the train going to Annapolis; I thought it such a streak of good luck and meant to follow it up, but when I got back to the city you had left."
"And if you hadn't come up here, perhaps our ways would have parted."