To which, the other answered tartly, “If we were not, there would be no woman in the case.”

As Conrad Lagrange spoke, Louise, exhausted by her efforts to achieve that sunset in the mountains with her limited supply of adjectives, floundered hopelessly into the expressive silence of clasped hands and heaving breast and ecstatically upturned eyes.  The artist, seizing the opportunity with the cunning of desperation, turned to Mrs. Taine, with some inane remark about the summers in California.

Whatever it was that he said, Mrs. Taine agreed with him, heartily, adding, “And you, I suppose, have been making good use of your time?  Or have you been simply storing up material and energy for this winter?”

This brought Louise out of the depths of that sunset, with a flop.  She was so sure that Mr. King had some inexpressibly wonderful work to show them.  Couldn’t they go at once to the equally inexpressibly beautiful studio, to see the inexpressibly lovely pictures that she was so inexpressibly sure he had been painting in the inexpressibly grand and beautiful and wonderfully lovely mountains?

The painter assured them that he had no work for them to see; and Louise floundered again into the depths of inexpressible disappointment and despair.

Nevertheless, a few minutes later, Aaron King found himself in his studio, alone with Mrs. Taine.  He could not have told exactly how she managed it, or why.  Perhaps, in sheer pity, she had rescued him from the floods of Louise’s appreciation.  Perhaps—­she had some other reasons.  There had been something said about her right to see her own picture, and then—­there they were—­with the others safely barred from intruding upon the premises sacred to art.

When there was no longer need to fear the eyes of the world, Mrs. Taine was at no pains to hide the warmth of her feeling.  With little reserve, she confessed herself in every look and tone and movement.

“Are you really glad to see me, I wonder,” she said invitingly.  “All this summer, while I have been forced to endure the company of all sorts of stupid people, I have been thinking of you and your work.  And, you see, I have come to you, the first possible moment after my return home.”

The man—­being a man—­could not remain wholly insensible to the alluring physical beauty of the splendid creature who stood so temptingly before him; but, to the honor of his kind, he could and did remain master of himself.

The woman, true to her life training,—­as James Rutlidge had been true to his schooling when he approached Sibyl Andres in the mountains,—­construed the artist’s manner, not as a splendid self-control but as a careful policy.  To her, and to her kind, the great issues of life are governed, not at all by principle, but by policy.  It is not at all what one is, or what one may accomplish that matters; it is wholly what one may skillfully appear to be, and what one may skillfully provoke the world to say, that is of vital importance.  Turning from the painter to the easel, as if to find in his portrait of her the fuller expression of that which she believed he dared not yet put into words, she was about to draw aside the curtain; when Aaron King checked her quickly, with a smile that robbed his words of any rudeness.