"Couldn't I though!" exclaimed the young man. "A lot you know about it. I could eat you up for one thing without turning a hair, and that would be wicked."
"It wouldn't," Barbara laughed. "It would be greedy. My new model has the face of a man who has never stopped at anything that has stood in his way. I fancy that he has murders up his sleeve and every other crime in the calendar. And sometimes memory of them brings the most wonderful look of sorrow and remorse into his face, and at the same time he looks resolved to go on murdering and burning and sinning because he can't get back to where he was when he began to fall, and must go on falling or perish. Don't you think that if I can cram that into a lump of clay I'll make a reputation for myself?"
"I think," said Wilmot, "that if you've got that kind of a man sitting for you, you'll need all the reputation you can get. You talk of him with the same sort of enthusiasm that a bird would show in describing being fascinated by a snake."
Barbara considered this judicially. "Do you know," she agreed, "it is rather like that. He fascinates me, and at the same time I never saw a brute I hated so. He must be wicked to deserve such pain."
"Oh, he suffers, does he?"
"Of course. Wouldn't you suffer every minute of your life if you had no legs?"
Barbara, intent upon what was on her plate, did not perceive the sudden astonished darkening of Wilmot Allen's face, nor that the interest which he had hitherto only feigned in her new model had become genuine.
"What is he?"
"I was going to say 'just a beggar,'" said Barbara. "But he isn't just a beggar. I've gathered that he's rather well off, and that he's one of the powers on the East Side. And he looks money and power, even if he doesn't talk them."
"Is his name by any chance Blizzard?"