“Never fear, you will pick that up fast enough, Betsy, and if you can deliver the goods, your fortune is made. What do you charge for the life-sized portrait of a baby?”
“Why, really, I haven’t a fixed price,” she answered, realizing that he was in earnest. “As I told you, I have painted but two portraits, and the payment for the last was the making of this gown. It was my dressmaker’s picture.” He looked her over critically.
“Well, it’s mighty becoming. I suppose that is equivalent to about five hundred dollars, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Tom! You are a greater baby than the sitters whom you propose to send to me,” she exclaimed. “If I become famous, I may ask that much years and years from now.”
“Young woman, you are to understand that you are ‘personally conducted’ in your new field, and I am your manager. It won’t do to cheapen your work by putting a small price on it. Make ’em pay, and they will think that you are great.”
“Not when they see my studio,” she answered, but his enthusiasm was comforting to her.
The little studio was not satisfying to Elizabeth as she transformed it into a bedroom by the simple process of bringing the bedclothes out from their place of concealment and sliding back the curtain. The unaccustomed luxury of the dinner had awakened old memories of the comfort and daintiness which had been unknown to her in her later life, and the rejection of her sketches had shattered the dreams of acquiring them again, which had comforted her when she sent them out. And Tom, bowling up the avenue in a hansom, felt uncomfortable at the thought of her being in such a place alone and unprotected, for the dinner had awakened memories in his mind, too, and renewed the old longing for Elizabeth which he thought the years of separation had conquered.
“But she is not the kind of a woman to come to me because she has made a failure, and, if she were, she would not be worth the winning,” he thought, bitterly, as he lighted his cigar. “A little more of the life she is leading now, a few more disappointments, and the woman that is in her, the part of herself which she has crushed back for the past three years, will be annihilated. I must find some way to rescue it, to rouse it, and when she has achieved, at least, a semblance of success, trust to my own good fortune to make her look at things as I want her to see them.”
It was a new proposition to him, and he racked his brain to find a way out, and by the time he reached his club he was in a mood to resort to physical violence, if necessary, to make any one of his married friends promise to deliver up a child for portrait purposes. But the club was deserted, and he went to bed to spend a wakeful night in seeking a solution of his problem.
Elizabeth smiled grimly the next day as she was preparing her frugal luncheon. A bunch of violets, whose value represented a half month’s rent of her tiny studio, was diffusing fragrance through it, and a basket of fruit, which would last a month, was on the table; but the necessaries were represented by a pot of tea, a package of biscuits and a small pat of butter. Even the last was an unwonted extravagance at midday, but, after the dinner of the night before, she could not descend too suddenly to dry biscuits, and, after all, Tom’s confidence had given her more courage for the future. She had even tried to work over the rejected sketches with a certain degree of hopefulness, but her heart was not in it, and she was gazing at one of them disconsolately, when there was a sharp knock at the door, and Tom, disregarding all studio ethics, burst in before she could open it. He seized both of her hands and whirled her about the room, to the grave peril of her modest bric-à-brac, his face beaming and his eyes sparkling with pleasure.