“Do—do you mean that you want me?”
“Why—yes! Would you like to pose for me? It’s pin-money, anyway. Would you like to try it?”
“Y-yes.”
“Are you quite sure? It’s hard work.”
“Quite—sure——” she stammered. The little flushed face was lifted very earnestly to his now, almost beseechingly. “I am quite sure,” she repeated breathlessly.
“So you’d really like to pose for me?” he insisted in smiling surprise at the girl’s visible excitement. Then he added abruptly: “I’ve half a mind to give you a job as my private model!”
Through the rosy confusion of her face her grey eyes were fixed on him with a wistful intensity, almost painful. For into her empty heart and starved mind had suddenly flashed a dazzling revelation. Opportunity was knocking at her door. Her chance had come! Perhaps it had been inherited from her mother—God knows!—this deep, deep hunger for things beautiful—this passionate longing for light and knowledge.
Mere contact with such a man as Barres had already made endurable a solitary servitude which had been subtly destroying her child’s spirit, and slowly dulling the hunger in her famished mind. And now to aid him—to feel that he was using her—was to arise from her rags of ignorance and emerge upright into the light which filled that wonder-house wherein he dwelt, and on the dark threshold of which her lonely little soul had crouched so long in silence.