No More Learning

Now, all your fancy heads--and some of them are very
good--will keep you exactly where you are. With line you must go forward
or backward, and it will show up all your weaknesses. "

"But other people----" began Maisie.

"You mustn't mind what other people do. If their souls were your soul,
it would be different. You stand and fall by your own work, remember,
and it's waste of time to think of any one else in this battle. "

Dick paused, and the longing that had been so resolutely put away came
back into his eyes. He looked at Maisie, and the look asked as plainly
as words, Was it not time to leave all this barren wilderness of canvas
and counsel and join hands with Life and Love? Maisie assented to the
new programme of schooling so adorably that Dick could hardly restrain
himself from picking her up then and there and carrying her off to the
nearest registrar's office. It was the implicit obedience to the spoken
word and the blank indifference to the unspoken desire that baffled and
buffeted his soul. He held authority in that house,--authority limited,
indeed, to one-half of one afternoon in seven, but very real while it
lasted. Maisie had learned to appeal to him on many subjects, from the
proper packing of pictures to the condition of a smoky chimney. The
red-haired girl never consulted him about anything.

On the other hand, she accepted his appearances without protest, and
watched him always. He discovered that the meals of the establishment
were irregular and fragmentary.
They depended chiefly on tea, pickles,
and biscuit, as he had suspected from the beginning. The girls were
supposed to market week and week about, but they lived, with the help of
a charwoman, as casually as the young ravens. Maisie spent most of her
income on models, and the other girl revelled in apparatus as refined
as her work was rough. Armed with knowledge, dear-bought from the Docks,
Dick warned Maisie that the end of semi-starvation meant the crippling
of power to work, which was considerably worse than death.

Maisie took the warning, and gave more thought to what she ate and
drank. When his trouble returned upon him, as it generally did in the
long winter twilights, the remembrance of that little act of domestic
authority and his coercion with a hearth-brush of the smoky drawing-room
chimney stung Dick like a whip-lash.

He conceived that this memory would be the extreme of his sufferings,
till one Sunday, the red-haired girl announced that she would make a
study of Dick's head, and that he would be good enough to sit still,
and--quite as an afterthought--look at Maisie. He sat, because he could
not well refuse, and for the space of half an hour he reflected on all
the people in the past whom he had laid open for the purposes of his
own craft. He remembered Binat most distinctly,--that Binat who had once
been an artist and talked about degradation.

It was the merest monochrome roughing in of a head, but it presented the
dumb waiting, the longing, and, above all, the hopeless enslavement of
the man, in a spirit of bitter mockery.

"I'll buy it," said Dick, promptly, "at your own price. "

"My price is too high, but I dare say you'll be as grateful if----" The
wet sketch, fluttered from the girl's hand and fell into the ashes of
the studio stove. When she picked it up it was hopelessly smudged.

"Oh, it's all spoiled! " said Maisie. "And I never saw it.