'And I thought the dressing-room would serve for Stella,' added Clement. 'Why, she is quite pink!'
'Have I really a room to myself?'
'There are enough in the house for that, my little Star,' said Felix. 'I suppose you will hardly make a further progress now, Whiteheart?'
'Only let me show her the Prior's room,' said Clement, taking her to the floor above the billiard-room. It had been a smoking-room in the last reign; the windows were hung with heavy curtains; there was both a stove and a cheerful grate in it, a thick carpet and cushions in the windows, and a high screen, to cut off the draught from the little window into the south transept, where the Prior of old used to hear Mass, if indisposed.
'I have been purifying this room, literally and metaphorically,' said Clement, thinking of the pictures he had removed, and the air he had let in. 'It will make Cherry a capital painting-room.'
'Oh! but it is too much! You must not give me all the best rooms in the house.'
'Who should have them but our lady of the house?' cried both brothers.
'And after all, there are conveniences in not painting in the drawing-room,' said Cherry. 'May I tell, Lance?' as they both fell into a transport of laughter. 'You must know, Willie there insisted that I should do Cleomenes after the battle, when he would not go into his deserted house. He used so much moral compulsion, that though I knew that a Greek warrior was as much beyond me as an archangel, I only feebly objected the want of a model; and Lance, in a spirit of classic friendship, said he would sit. So one afternoon—there he stood, with his trousers turned up to his knees, and his shirt-sleeves up to his shoulders, no shoes or stockings—the table-cover gracefully disposed with a big shawl-brooch on one shoulder for a chlamys—leaning on Sibby's long broom-stick by way of a spear, endeavouring to compose his face as if his wife were dead, and his children in captivity, and he just beaten horse and foot, and going after them.'
