He laughed.
“Well, I don’t recommend that,” he said. “But it can be done. However, that is not my concern, as I’m not a broker. I will send you a note in the morning.”
“Too good of you!” she said. “And you won’t tell my husband I asked you?”
“Certainly not,” said he, “though I really can’t imagine why not.”
The unreal Philip—the one, that is to say, that Madge did not know—had had the door slammed pretty smartly in his face, and when the real Philip went to Evelyn’s studio the next afternoon he had not attempted to put in another appearance. Evelyn, when he arrived, was working at the background of Madge’s portrait, and he yelled to the other to keep his eyes off it.
“You musn’t see it till it’s done!” he cried. “Just turn your back, there’s a good chap, till I put it with its face to the wall. I had no idea till I looked at it to-day how nearly it is finished. I do wish Miss Ellington could have come this afternoon instead of you—which sounds polite, but isn’t—and I really think I might have made it the last sitting. That sounds polite too. By the way, what an ass I am; I never made another appointment with her last night!”
This was all sufficiently frank, for Evelyn had managed, with the healthy optimism of which she had so much, to reason himself out of his fantastic forebodings of the evening before. It was left, therefore, for Philip, a task which was not at all to his taste, to put them all neatly back again.
“I really doubt if she could have given you an appointment off-hand,” he said, still fencing a little. “She is really so frightfully busy I hardly set eyes on her. Apparently, when you are to be married, you have to buy as many things as if you were going to live on a desert island for the rest of your life.”
Evelyn checked for a moment at this; the healthy optimism weakened a little.
“I must write and ask her,” he said, “or go and try to find her in. I must have the sitting soon; the thing won’t be half so good if I have to wait. It is all ready; it just wants her for an hour or two.”