She ran off, and was ready in a few minutes. We gave the driver directions, and set off. It was a long drive. At length he stopped at the door of a very common-looking house, in a very dreary-looking street, in which no man could possibly identify his own door except by the number. I knocked. A woman who looked at once dirty and cross, the former probably the cause of the latter, opened the door, gave a bare assent to my question whether Mr. Percivale was at home, withdrew to her den with the words "second-floor," and left us to find our own way up the two flights of stairs. This, however, involved no great difficulty. We knocked at the door of the front room. A well-known voice cried, "Come in," and we entered.
Percivale, in a short velvet coat, with his palette on his thumb, advanced to meet us cordially. His face wore a slight flush, which I attributed solely to pleasure, and nothing to any awkwardness in receiving us in such a poor place as he occupied. I cast my eyes round the room. Any romantic notions Wynnie might have indulged concerning the marvels of a studio, must have paled considerably at the first glance around Percivale's room—plainly the abode if not of poverty, then of self-denial, although I suspected both. A common room, with no carpet save a square in front of the fireplace; no curtains except a piece of something like drugget nailed flat across all the lower half of the window to make the light fall from upwards; two or three horsehair chairs, nearly worn out; a table in a corner, littered with books and papers; a horrible lay-figure, at the present moment dressed apparently for a scarecrow; a large easel, on which stood a half-finished oil-painting—these constituted almost the whole furniture of the room. With his pocket-handkerchief Percivale dusted one chair for Wynnie and another for me. Then standing before us, he said:
"This is a very shabby place to receive you in, Miss Walton, but it is all I have got."
"A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things he possesses," I ventured to say.
"Thank you," said Percivale. "I hope not. It is well for me it should not."
"It is well for the richest man in England that it should not," I returned. "If it were not so, the man who could eat most would be the most blessed."
"There are people, even of my acquaintance, however, who seem to think it does."
"No doubt; but happily their thinking so will not make it so even for themselves."
"Have you been very busy since you left us, Mr. Percivale?" asked Wynnie.
"Tolerably," he answered. "But I have not much to show for it. That on the easel is all. I hardly like to let you look at it, though."