ALINE sat in the studio, the picture of housewifely concern, mending Jimmie's socks. It was not the unoffending garments that brought the expression into her face, but her glance at the old Dutch clock—so old and crotchety that unless it were tilted to one side it would not consent to go—whose hands had come with an asthmatic whir to the hour of eleven. And Jimmie had not yet come down to breakfast. She had called him an hour ago. His cheery response had been her sanction for putting the meal into preparation, and now the bacon would be uneatable. She sighed. Taking care of Jimmie was no light responsibility. Not that he would complain; far from it. He would eat the bacon raw or calcined if she set it before him. But that would not be for his good, and hence the responsibility. In slipping from her grasp and doing the things he ought not to do, he was an eel or a twelve-year-old schoolboy. Last night, for instance, instead of finishing off some urgent work for an art periodical, he had assured her in his superlative manner that it was of no consequence, and had wasted his evening with her at the Earl's Court Exhibition. It had been warm and lovely, and the band and the bright crowd had set her young pulses throbbing, and they had sat at a little table, and Jimmie had given her some celestial liquid which she had sucked through a straw, and altogether, to use her own unsophisticated dialect, it had been perfectly heavenly. But it was wrong of Jimmie to have sacrificed himself for her pleasure, and to have deceived her into accepting it. For at three or four o'clock she had heard him tiptoeing softly past her door on his way to bed, and the finished work she had found on his table this morning betrayed his occupation. Even the consolation of scolding him for oversleep and a spoiled breakfast was thus denied. She spread out her hand in the sock so as to gauge the extent of a hole, and, contemplating it, sighed again.
The studio was a vast room distempered in bluish grey, and Aline, sitting solitary at the far end, in the line of a broad quivering beam of light that streamed through a lofty window running the whole width of the north-east side, looked like a little brown saint in a bare conventual hall. For an ascetic simplicity was the studio's key-note. No curtains, draperies, screens, Japaneseries, no artistic scheme of decoration, no rare toys of furniture filled the place with luxurious inspiration. Here and there about the walls hung a sketch by a brother artist; of his own unsold pictures and studies some were hung, others stacked together on the floor. An old, rusty, leather drawing-room suite distributed about the studio afforded sitting accommodation. There was the big easel bearing the subject-picture on which he now was at work, with a smaller easel carrying the study by its side. On the model-stand a draped lay figure sprawled grotesquely. A long deal table was the untidy home of piles of papers, books, colours, brushes, artistic properties. A smaller table at the end where Aline sat was laid for breakfast. It was one of Jimmie's eccentricities to breakfast in the studio. The dining-room for dinner—he yielded to the convention; for lunch, perhaps; for breakfast, no. All his intimate life had been passed in the studio; the prim little drawing-room he scarcely entered half-a-dozen times in the year.
Aline was contemplating the hole in the sock when the door opened. She sprang to her feet, advanced a step, and then halted with a little exclamation.
“Oh, it's you!”
“Yes. Are you disappointed?” asked the smiling youth who had appeared instead of the expected Jimmie.
“I can get over it. How are you, Tony?”
Mr. Anthony Merewether gave her the superfluous assurance that he was in good health. He had the pleasant boyish face and clean-limbed figure of the young Englishman upon whom cares sit lightly. Aline resumed her work demurely. The young man seated himself near by.
“How is Jimmie?”
“Whom are you calling 'Jimmie'?” asked Aline. “Mr. Padgate, if you please.”
“You call him Jimmie.”