“School over already?” he asked, in a disappointed tone.
“No, they’re only turning the gas down for coolness while the model has a rest. You see, she can’t stand two hours straight off the reel.”
“No, I guess not,” said Matt, and then repented of having said “guess,” for he was trying to prune away his humble expressions and to remember the idioms of the educated people with whom his new life was bringing him into contact. “It must be awful hard,” he added.
“Yes; especially in a school where a lot of chaps are working at once, and she can’t rest a limb because somebody might just be painting it. One woman told me she’d rather scrub floors so as to feel her limbs moving about. But posing pays better. This is a new model—first time she’s been here. Pity women with such fine figures haven’t got prettier faces. Have a cigarette?”
“No, thanks,” said Matt.
“Don’t smoke?”
“I did smoke once, but I gave it up.” Matt did not like to confess it was because he could not afford the luxury.
“You can’t be an artist without tobacco,” said his mentor, laughingly. “Ah, here’s the model. I’ll just go and get her address.”
He went up to the model, who had re-emerged and seated herself at ease upon the throne, where a group of students, with pipes or cigarettes in their mouths, was in conversation with her.
Matt followed his mentor, interested in this new specimen of humanity, and thinking that he would prefer to paint her as she was sitting then, nude in that dim, mysterious light, surrounded by smoke-wreathed figures in tropic headgear, her face alive, her feet crossed gracefully, playing a part in a real scene, yet withal unreal to the point of grotesqueness.