"I must now plod along without interruption," she answered.
"I had thought of making another study. The finished thing is all right, but one doesn't come across a face like yours very often."
"No," put in Frieda, "and it's a good thing for you that you've had the exclusive painting of it. If she had continued as a model and been done by every Tom, Dick and Harry——"
"True. Since I can't paint her again, I'm glad no one else will. No, thank you, I won't have any more tea. How's the new picture, Frieda?"
For a few minutes the two monopolized the conversation. To some extent they spoke a jargon of their own, to which Frances and I listened with little understanding.
"And what do you think of it, Dave?" he asked, turning abruptly to me.
"It is a beautiful thing," I answered. "If I had Frieda's imagination and her sense of beauty, I should be the great, undiscovered American novelist. She makes one believe that the world is all roses and violets and heliotropes, touched by sunshine and kissed by soft breezes. It is tenanted only by sprites and godlings, according to her magic brush."
"The world is no such thing," he retorted, sharply.
"The world is what one's imagination, one's sentiment and one's conscience makes it," I asserted, "at least during some precious moments of every lifetime."
"Oh! I know. You can sit at that old machine of yours and throw your head back and see more upon your ceiling than the cracked plaster, and Frieda does the same thing. Now my way is to take real flesh and blood, yes, and dead lobsters and codfish and dowagers and paint them in the best light I can get on them, but it's the light I really see."