“That’s true enough,” he ruefully agreed. “Nevertheless the money is due to you; I received the tuition.”
“It is not due,” replied Jill firmly. “You are making me a present of it, Mr St. John, and I will not accept such a gift. There is your cheque, take it back if you please.”
He took it from her, tore it savagely into pieces, and threw them on the floor.
“So be it,” he answered wrathfully. “You must indeed be succeeding as you deserve, to reject what you have lawfully earned.”
Jill went white as she generally did when in a rage, and favoured him with a glance that he was not likely to forget in a hurry.
“I have not earned it,” she responded, “neither am I succeeding; two facts which you are thoroughly well acquainted with. Does that look like success?” And she drew from the cardboard box the sachets she had brought home again from the shop that morning, and threw them on the table in front of him. “That’s the kind of work that I have come to do, and I daresay I shall sink lower yet;—Xmas cards no doubt. Oh! yes, I have sunk pretty low. The man who gave me that order superintends the work, and corrects errors of detail. He does not like female figures in atmospheric drapery like those. He said the public wouldn’t buy them that way; a nude figure on a nightdress bag—he didn’t use the word nude, by the way, but plain vulgar English—was too suggestive, and requested me to take them home and paint in a garment—‘Just a small one’—as though he were alluding to a vest. Ugh! it makes me sick—it makes me blush. He wears his hair oiled, too,” she continued retrospectively, forgetting for the minute her resentment against St. John in disgust at her latest patron, “and—further degradation—makes love to me which for the sake of the miserable commission I dare not resent.”
What followed was unpardonable on St. John’s part but for the life of him he could not resist retaliating for the thrusts that she had given him.
“Perhaps the last is a hallucination,” he suggested ungenerously; “You have a tendency to imagine that sort of thing you know.”
She eyed him for a moment in stony displeasure, then pointed imperiously to the door.
“You may consider that remark worthy of a gentleman, Mr St. John,” she said, “I don’t. You will oblige me by leaving the studio at once; I—I shall be rude to you if you don’t.”