"Yes, certainly," Miss Maitland answered in a matter-of-fact tone.
He hesitated.
"I never wanted to do anything well so much as I want to do your portrait well. I want to make your portrait by far the finest thing that I have ever done—or that I ever shall do," he said. "Truly beautiful—and truly you."
"That is extremely good of you," replied the girl in a perfectly level voice, manifesting no more emotion than she would have displayed had he dramatically announced that he purposed executing her likeness on canvas and that he intended to use oil paints of various colors. "Good-by," she added, and the door closed behind the artist.
Charles Wilkinson, returning from the Hurds' to his boarding house, opened the front door with his latch key and stepped into the dingy hall. On a small table beside the hatrack lay the boarders' mail. He picked out three envelopes addressed to him, walked upstairs, and entered his room. Seating himself in the only comfortable chair the apartment afforded, he gloomily regarded the three missives.
The first bore on its upper left-hand corner the mark of his tailor, a chronic creditor, once patient, then consecutively surprised, annoyed, amazed, and of late showing signs of extreme exasperation accompanied by threats; at the end of the gamut the contents of this would be more vivacious reading than merely the monotonous and colorless repetition of an account rendered. The second was from his dentist, a man spurred to fury, whose extraction of two wisdom teeth had been of trifling difficulty in comparison with the task of extracting from his patient the amount named in his bill, and who had found in Wilkinson's mouth no cavity comparable in gravity with that apparently existing in his bank balance. The third envelope carried the name of a firm of lawyers not unknown to the man addressed—a firm that specialized in the collection of bad debts; Wilkinson looked at this longer than at either of the others, for he was ignorant of its contents. Then, without opening any one of the three, he thoughtfully took out his fountain pen.
Crossing out his own Mount Vernon Place address from all three envelopes, he readdressed the tailor's communication in an alien hand to the Hotel Bon Air, Augusta, Georgia. On the dentist's missive he inscribed "Auditorium Annex, Chicago, Illinois." Over the lawyer's letter he hesitated a moment, and then boldly wrote "Chateau Frontenac, Quebec, P. Q." This would at least be a grateful reprieve. After five days all these epistles would be returned to their senders, who would probably not question the fact that their failure to reach him had not been purely accidental. Moreover his credit with this trio would positively be improved by the impression that his resources were at any rate sufficient to enable him to travel far and to stop at well-known hotels.
After he had dropped the three envelopes into the post-box it occurred to him that he might just as well—perhaps even better—have sent all three to the same place, but even allowing liberally for the incorrectness of this detail, Mr. Hurd's opinion of his step-nephew seemed in a fair way of being justified.
CHAPTER II
It occurred to Mr. Smith that no one has ever determined the precise idea upon which the Boston and Manhattan Railroad bases its schedules with its infrequent adherence thereto and customary deviation therefrom. Numberless ingenious theories have been advanced from time to time by untold thousands of exasperated patrons of the line; opinions of all colors, all temperatures, all degrees of light and shade have been volunteered, many with a violence that lends conviction, but all in vain. The thing remains as secret, as recondite, as baffling as ever. Good Bostonians regard attempts to solve the problem as not only futile but impertinent—almost blasphemous—accepting it as a factor in the general inscrutability which veils the world, and are content to let it remain such.