"Yes, it is sure to," cried Lucy, who saw an opportunity for escaping from the detested propriety topic. "To-day, for instance, with Mr. Oakley. He is middle-aged, by the bye, Gerty, and married, for I saw his wife."
They both laughed; they could, indeed, afford to laugh, for, regarded from a financial point of view, the morning had been an unusually satisfactory one.
Gertrude's prophetic vision of vistas of studio work proved, for the next few days at least, to have been no baseless fabric of the fancy. The two artists at York Place kept them so busy over models, sketches, and arrangements of drapery, that the girls' hands were full from morning till night. Of course this did not last, but Frank was so full of suggestions for them, so genuinely struck with the quality of their work, so anxious to recommend them to his comrades in art, that their spirits rose high, and hope, which for a time had almost failed them, arose, like a giant refreshed, in their breasts.
In all simplicity and respect, the young Cornishman took a deep and unconcealed interest in the photographic firm, and expected, on his part, a certain amount of interest to be taken in his own work.
Frank, as Conny had said, worked chiefly in black and white. He was engaged, at present, in illustrating a serial story for The Woodcut, but he had time on his hands for a great deal more work, time which he employed in painting pictures which the public refused to buy, although the committees were often willing to exhibit them.
"If they would only send me out to that wretched little war," he said. "There is nothing like having been a special artist for getting a man on with the pictorial editors."
There is nothing like the salt of healthy objective interests for keeping the moral nature sound. Before the sense of mutual honesty, the little barriers of prudishness which both sides had thought fit in the first instance to raise, fell silently between the young people, never again to be lifted up.
For good or evil, these waifs on the great stream of London life had drifted together; how long the current should continue thus to bear them side by side—how long, indeed, they should float on the surface of the stream at all, was a question with which, for the time being, they did not very much trouble themselves.
No one quite knew how it came about, but before a month had gone by, it became the most natural thing in the world for Frank to drop in upon them at unexpected hours, to share their simple meals, to ask and give advice about their respective work.