“Do! And I’ll promise to like your Hank and not put on my grand manner when he begins telling me what fun you and he used to have in the good old days before I was born or thought of. May I?”
“But——”
“Quick! Promise!”
“Very well.”
“You dear! I’ll be the best model you ever had. I won’t move a muscle, and I’ll stand there till I drop.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind. You’ll come right down off that model-throne the instant you feel the least bit tired.”
The picture which Kirk was painting was one of those pictures which thousands of young artists are working on unceasingly every day. Kirk’s ideas about it were in a delightfully vague state. He had a notion that it might turn out in the end as “Carmen.” On the other hand, if anything went wrong and he failed to insert a sufficient amount of wild devilry into it, he could always hedge by calling it “A Reverie” or “The Spanish Maiden.”
Possibly, if the thing became too pensive and soulful altogether, he might give it some title suggestive of the absent lover at the bull-fight—“The Toreador’s Bride”—or something of that sort. The only point on which he was solid was that it was to strike the Spanish note; and to this end he gave Ruth a costume of black and orange and posed her on the model-throne with a rose in her hair.
Privately he had decided that ten minutes would be Ruth’s limit. He knew something of the strain of sitting to an artist.