“A professional model? Worse and worse! and how comes it that you were walking with such a questionable character?”
I related the entire story as simply as possible; but it was evident that Miss Noakes did not approve.
“A most extraordinary performance,” she commented. “I feel it my duty to report it to Madame.”
“You may spare yourself that trouble, Miss Noakes,” Adelaide replied. “Tib, Winnie, and I are going to tell Madame all about it at her next office hour. We want to ask her permission to get up a little entertainment in behalf of Polo’s little brother and sisters.”
“And I shall suggest to Madame,” Miss Noakes added, “the advisability of inquiring into the character and antecedents of this girl, before she allows her to become an accredited dependent of her establishment, or authorizes the bestowal of charity upon her family. Artists’ models are often disreputable people with whom your parents would not be willing that you should associate, and I advise you not to become too intimate with a perfect stranger.”
We had come through the ordeal on the whole quite triumphantly, but Polo had excited Miss Noakes’s enmity. She could never be won to regard her as anything but a vagabond, and always spoke of her as ‘that model girl’ in a tone that belied the literal signification of the words; and later, when by dint of spying and listening Miss Noakes learned that a robbery had been committed in the Amen Corner, her dislike and suspicion of poor Polo led to very painful consequences. The relation of which, however, belongs to a later chapter.
