"You'll never finish it," said May; "it will be like all the rest. You'll begin on a gigantic scale and with super-human efforts, and you'll cool down and get sick of it before it is half finished, and it will go to swell the pile of daubed canvas in your studio now. Don't tell me! I know you."
"And have the poorest possible opinion of me, Miss Everard?"
"Yes, I have! I have no patience when I think what you might do, what you might become, and see what you are! If you were not Sir Rupert Thetford, with a princely income, you might be a great man. As it is——"
"As it is!" cried the young baronet, trying to laugh and reddening violently, "I will still be a great man—a modern Murillo. Are you not a little severe, Miss Everard? Aileen, I believe this is your first visit to my studio?"
"Yes," said Miss Jocyln, coldly and briefly. She did not like the conversation, and May Everard's familiar home-truths stung her. To her he was everything mortal man should be; she was proud, but she was not ambitious; what right had this penniless little free-speaker to come between them and talk like this?
May was flitting about like the fairy she was, her head a little on one side, like a critical canary, her flowing skirt held up, inspecting the pictures.
"'Jeanne D'Arc before her Judges,' half finished, as usual, and never to be completed; and weak—very, if it ever was completed. 'Battle of Bosworth Field,' in flaming colors, all confusion and smoke and red ochre and rubbish; you did well not to trouble yourself any more with that. 'Swiss Peasant'—ah! that is pretty. 'Storm at Sea,' just tolerable. 'Trial of Marie Antoinette.' My dear Rupert, why will you persist in these figure paintings when you know your forte is landscape? 'An Evening in the Eternal City.' Now, that is what I call an exquisite little thing! Look at the moon, Aileen, rising over those hill-tops; and see those trees—you can almost feel the wind that blows! And that prostrate figure—why, that looks like yourself, Rupert!"
"It is myself."
"And the other, stooping—who is he?"
"The painter of that picture, Miss Everard; yes, the only thing in my poor studio you see fit to eulogize is not mine. It was done by an artist friend—an unknown Englishman, who saved my life in Rome three years ago. Come in, mother mine, and defend your son from the two-edged sword of May Everard's tongue."