"And who will put up the tin: for you don't suppose that I am low enough to live off you?"
"No," replied the woman, quietly. "I shouldn't allow that, though I was not quite sure you would be unwilling. But you can borrow two or three hundred dollars from your brother, and by the time that's gone you ought to be earning something. You could join a class; the house isn't far from those studios."
Clayton impulsively seized her arms and looked into her face. She was startled and almost frightened.
"I believe," he began, but the words faded away.
"No, don't say it. You believe that I am in love with you, and do this to keep you near me. Don't be quite such a brute, for you are a brute, a grasping, egotistical, intolerant brute." She smiled slightly. "But don't think that I am such a fool as not to know how impossible that is."
Clayton still held her in astonishment. "I think I was going to say that I was in love with you."
"Oh, no," she laughed, sadly. "I am coffee and milk and bread and butter, the 'stuff that dreams are made on.' You want some noble young woman—a goddess, to make you over, to make you human. I only save you from the poor-house."
IV
There followed a bitter two years for this strange couple. Clayton borrowed a thousand dollars—a more convenient number to remember, he said, than three hundred dollars—and induced a prominent artist "who happens to know something," to take him into his crowded classes for a year. He began with true grit to learn again what he had forgotten and some things that he had never known. At the end of the year he felt that he could go alone, and the artist agreed, adding, nonchalantly: "You may get there; God knows; but you need loads of work."
Domestically, the life was monotonous. Clayton had abandoned his old habits, finding it difficult to harmonize his present existence with his clubs and his fashionable friends. Besides, he hoarded every cent and, with Miss Marston's aid, wrung the utmost of existence out of the few dollars he had left. Miss Marston's modest house was patronized by elderly single ladies. It was situated on one of those uninteresting East Side streets where you can walk a mile without remembering an individual stone. The table, in food and conversation, was monotonous. In fact, Clayton could not dream of a more inferior milieu for the birth of the great artist.