He followed her deferentially to the door, and the six young gentlemen stood up with one accord in a row and bowed like their master.
She passed out through the unfinished alterations in the courtyard, with flushed cheeks. When she was out in the street her mood was one of mingled triumph and disappointment. "No, that was not my path of fate," she said to herself.
But she had unexpectedly acquired a fiancé, and that was something.
CHAPTER IV
August Kellermann passed for an artist of considerable reputation, though his pictures did not sell. He was a sharp-witted, sharp-tongued, good-natured person in the middle of the thirties, well-versed in all the vices of the capital. He had a sandy Rubens beard, prominent little eyes, with an eternal weariness in them as if he had never been in bed the night before.
He rented a studio that had once been a photographer's. It was of huge dimensions, like a magnified glass case. He had draped the roof, as a protection from glare and heat, with Turkish rugs propped by poles, giving his studio the air of a Bedouin's tent.
When Lilly stepped out of the dim twilight of the anteroom into the garish brilliance of the studio, which was so lofty it seemed part of the sky, she found him in a plum-coloured overall, with green down-at-heel slippers over which his red plaid socks hung in rucks, seated on the floor, beside an Oriental coffee apparatus, stirring an extinguished spirit-lamp.
"Good Lord!" he exclaimed, without getting up to return her greeting; "this is a visit worth having."
Lilly turned to go away again, and he immediately sprang to his feet, pulled up his trousers, and with a shrug of his shoulders dusted a bamboo chair with his sleeve.
"Sit down, my child. Though I have nearly given up painting for pottery, and couldn't make use of Helen of Troy herself as a model, I am not going to let you slip through my fingers."