"No," she gasped; "I couldn't take anything like half so much for the whole thing."
Bulstrode said coldly:
"I'm afraid I must insist, Miss Desprey; I couldn't order less than a fifteen-hundred dollar portrait. It's the sum I have planned to pay when I'm painted."
"But a celebrated painter would paint it for that."
Bulstrode smiled fatuously.
"Can't a man pay for his fads? I want to be painted by the person who did that portrait over there, Miss Desprey."
In a tiny studio—the dingy chrysalis of a Bohemian art student—Bulstrode posed for his portrait.
Each morning saw him set forth from the Ritz alert and debonaire in his fastidious toilet—-saw him cross the Place Vendôme, the bridge, and lose his worldly figure in the lax nonchalant crowd of the Quarter Latin. At the end of an alley as narrow and picturesque as a lane in a colored print he knocked at a green door, and was admitted to the studio by his protégée. In another second he had assumed his prescribed position according to the pose, and Miss Desprey before her easel began the séance.
On these May days the glass roof admitted delightful gradations of glory to the commonplace atelier. A few cheap casts, a few yards of mustard-toned burlaps, some Botticelli and Manet photographs, a mangy divan, and a couple of chairs were the furnishings. It had been impossible for Bulstrode to pass indifferently the venders of flowers in the festive, brilliant streets, and great bunches of giroflé, hyacinths, and narcissi overflowed the earthenware pitchers and vases with which the studio was plentifully supplied. The soft, sharp fragrance rose above the shut-in odor of the atelier, and, while Miss Desprey worked, her patron looked at her across waves of spring perfume.
Her painting-dress, a garment of beige linen, half belted in at the waist and entirely covering her, made her to Bulstrode, from the crown of her fair hair to the tip of her old tan shoes, seem all of one color. He had taken tremendous interest in his pose, in the progress of the work. He would have looked at the portrait every few moments, but Miss Desprey refused him even a glimpse. He was to wait until all manner of strange things took place on the canvas, till "schemes and composition" were determined, "proper values" arrived at, and he listened to her glib school terms with respect and a sanguine hope that with the aid of such potent technicalities and his interest she might be able to achieve this time something short of atrocious.