Kirk’s reception of the news relieved her.
“Of course,” he said. “He couldn’t do anything else. He knew nothing of me except that I was a kind of man with whom he was quite out of sympathy. He mistrusted all artists, I expect, in a bunch. And, anyway, an artist is pretty sure to be a bad man of business. He would know that. And—and, well, what I mean is, it strikes me as a very sensible arrangement. Why are we stopping here?”
The car had drawn up before a large house on the upper avenue, one of those houses which advertise affluence with as little reticence as a fat diamond solitaire.
“We live here,” said Ruth, laughing.
Kirk drew a long breath.
“Do we? By George!” he exclaimed. “I see it’s going to take me quite a while to get used to this state of things.”
A thought struck him.
“How about the studio? Have you got rid of it?”
“Of course not. The idea! After the perfect times we had there! We’re going to keep it on as an annex. Every now and then, when we are tired of being rich, we’ll creep off there and boil eggs over the gas-stove and pretend we are just ordinary persons again.”
“And oftener than every now and then this particular plutocrat is going to creep off there and try to teach himself to paint pictures.”