“You had no right to take such an advantage,” flashed the girl, turning crimson.
“So?” The great woman smiled. “But I think my own thoughts. When one pays, or the other pays, that is well. It is the chance of the play. But when both pay—oh, that is wrong, wrong, wrong as wrong can be!”
“I can't help it,” said the girl, very low. “There is a previous debt.” And she turned aside a face so woe-begone that her interrogator forbore further pressure.
“At least,” she said, “the artist must complete the work, at whatever cost to the woman. You will finish that?” She jerked her head toward the studio.
“I—I suppose so. If I can.”
On the way home the genius caught a glimpse of Cyrus the Gaunt upon his triumphal chariot, and halted her auto the better to laugh. As the lumbering, clamoring monster drew opposite, she signaled. Cyrus did something abstruse to the mechanism, which groaned and clanked itself into stillness.
“Young man,” she hailed, “I have a message for you.”
“From whom?” said Cyrus hopefully. “From myself. This is it: Be careful.”
“I am,” said Cyrus with conviction, “the carefulest captain that ever ploughed the stormy pave.”
“Be careful,” she repeated, disregarding his interpretation, “or she'll make a man of you yet. The process is sometimes painful—like most creative processes, Home, Joseph.”