"What people—what models?" Miriam asked as she arranged her hat before the glass.
"Well, no one so good as you."
"That's a prospect!" the girl laughed—"for all the good you've got out of me!"
"You're no judge of that quantity," said Nick, "and even I can't measure it just yet. Have I been rather a bore and a brute? I can easily believe it; I haven't talked to you—I haven't amused you as I might. The truth is that taking people's likenesses is a very absorbing, inhuman occupation. You can't do much to them besides."
"Yes, it's a cruel honour to pay them."
"Cruel—that's too much," he objected.
"I mean it's one you shouldn't confer on those you like, for when it's over it's over: it kills your interest in them. After you've finished them you don't like them any more at all."
"Surely I like you," Nick returned, sitting tilted back before his picture with his hands in his pockets.
"We've done very well: it's something not to have quarrelled"—and she smiled at him now, seeming more "in" it. "I wouldn't have had you slight your work—I wouldn't have had you do it badly. But there's no fear of that for you," she went on. "You're the real thing and the rare bird. I haven't lived with you this way without seeing that: you're the sincere artist so much more than I. No, no, don't protest," she added with one of her sudden, fine transitions to a deeper tone. "You'll do things that will hand on your name when my screeching is happily over. Only you do seem to me, I confess, rather high and dry here—I speak from the point of view of your comfort and of my personal interest in you. You strike me as kind of lonely, as the Americans say—rather cut off and isolated in your grandeur. Haven't you any confrères—fellow-artists and people of that sort? Don't they come near you?"
"I don't know them much," Nick humbly confessed. "I've always been afraid of them, and how can they take me seriously?"