He got up after a time and looked out of the window again. She came also. "It's not very nice around here," she explained, "but papa and mamma like to live here. It's near papa's work."
"Was that your father I met at the door?"
"They're not my real parents," she explained. "I'm an adopted child. They're just like real parents to me, though, I certainly owe them a lot."
"You can't have been posing in art very long," said Eugene thoughtfully, thinking of her age.
"No; I only began about a year ago."
She told how she had been a clerk in The Fair and how she and another girl had got the idea from seeing articles in the Sunday papers. There was once a picture in the Tribune of a model posing in the nude before the local life class. This had taken her eye and she had consulted with the other girl as to whether they had not better try posing, too. Her friend, like herself, was still posing. She was coming to the dinner.
Eugene listened entranced. It reminded him of how he was caught by the picture of Goose Island in the Chicago River, of the little tumble-down huts and upturned hulls of boats used for homes. He told her of that and of how he came, and it touched her fancy. She thought he was sentimental but nice—and then he was big, too, and she was so much smaller.
"You play?" he asked, "don't you?"
"Oh, just a little. But we haven't got a piano. I learned what I know by practising at the different studios."
"Do you dance?" asked Eugene.