“Now, Miss Isabel,” Mr. Smiles proceeded, exasperatingly deliberate, “d’you know, I feel kind of guilty?  I have got a little farm out in Westchester County and I’m making a little English pathway up the garden with a gate at the end.  I woke up this morning and began to think about the quaint English form of that gate, and just how I would have it.”  He raised a finger.  “But I ought to have been thinking about you.  I ought to have been saying to myself, ’To-day I have to photograph Isabel Joy,’ and trying to understand in meditation the secrets of your personality.  I’m sorry!  Now, don’t talk.  Keep like that.  Move your head round.  Go on!  Go on!  Move it.  Don’t be afraid.  This place belongs to you.  It’s yours.  Whatever you do, we’ve got people here who’ll straighten up after you....  D’you know why I’ve made money?  I’ve made money so that I can take you this afternoon, and tell a two-hundred-dollar client to go to the deuce.  That’s why I’ve made money.  Put your back against the chair, like an Englishwoman.  That’s it.  No, don’t talk, I tell you.  Now look joyful, hang it!  Look joyful....  No, no!  Joy isn’t a contortion.  It’s something right deep down.  There, there!”

The lubricant voice rolled on while Rentoul Smiles manipulated the camera.  He clasped the bulb again and again threw it dramatically away.

“I’m through!” he said.  “Don’t expect anything very grand, Miss Isabel.  What I’ve been trying to do this afternoon is my interpretation of you as I’ve studied your personality in your speeches.  If I believed wholly in your cause, or if I wholly disbelieved in it, my work would not have been good.  Any value that it has will be due to the sympathetic impartiality of my spiritual attitude.  Although”—­he menaced her with the licensed familiarity of a philosopher—­“although, lady, I must say that I felt you were working against me all the time....  This way!”

(Edward Henry, recalling the comparative simplicity of the London photographer at Wilkins’s, thought:  “How profoundly they understand photography in America!”)

Isabel Joy rose and glanced at the watch in her bracelet, then followed the direction of the male hand and vanished.

Rentoul Smiles turned instantly to the other doorway.

“How do, Rent?” said Seven Sachs, coming forward.

“How do, Seven?” Mr. Rentoul Smiles winked.

“This is my good friend, Alderman Machin, the theatre-manager from London.”

“Glad to meet you, sir.”

“She’s not gone, has she?” asked Sachs, hurriedly.

“No, my housekeeper wanted to talk to her.  Come along.”

And in the waiting-room, full of permanent examples of the results of Mr. Rentoul Smiles’s spiritual attitude towards his fellow-men, Edward Henry was presented to Isabel Joy.  The next instant the two men and the housekeeper had unobtrusively retired, and he was alone with his objective.  In truth, Seven Sachs was a notable organizer.