"Elle a peutêtre raison."
"Perhaps."
"You say that too calmly by half," was his gay response. "Yet as every work a woman does has a man for its end—I learned that from the classics; Penelope, you know, and even washwoman Nausicaä—I suppose it is fair to assume this had. Only who is the man?"
Helen flushed slightly. She recalled the ambition with which she had begun this work, to make the man beside her praise its completion; and she was conscious that before she finished it was the praise of Herman for which she strove.
"It is filthy lucre that inspires me," she replied steadily. "I need no other incentive."
They walked about the studio, talking of the bas-relief as seen from different points; of how it was to be cut for firing; and on the safe ground of art they forgot all personal constraints, until the striking of a clock aroused Fenton to a sense of the flight of time.
"I must go," he said. "I am no end glad I came. The truth is I am not very well acquainted with this married man, and it is comfortable to slip back occasionally into a familiar bachelor mood. However," he continued with his brightest smile, "I like the Benedick far better than I should ever have dreamed possible; and his wife is charming. And I want to say, too," he added, "that I have a thousand times thanked you for taking that vial before I went to be married. I'm in a spasm of virtuousness just now, and it is pleasant to remember that I did not have it that day."
They went down stairs and out into the soft, spring-like day, sauntering homeward in a happy and accordant mood. Arthur urged Helen's going home to lunch with himself and Edith, but to Helen the morning was far too precious to be ended in a possibly inharmonious meeting with Mrs. Fenton.
And that afternoon Herman sent for Mrs. Greyson in all haste. Ninitta had vented her jealous rage upon the bas-relief, destroying the head of December which she heard Fenton say must have been done con amore, and the beautiful May for which she herself had posed.