stoves to render them habitable in winter.  In putting them up, however, cautiously and one by one, the landlord had esteemed them to be the sort of thing that was good enough for artists and that artists would willingly accept.  He had not been mistaken.  Though inexpensive they were dear, but artists accepted them with eagerness.  None was ever empty.  Thus it was demonstrated once more that artists were exactly what capitalists and other sagacious persons had always accused them of being.

When George knocked on the door of No. 6, the entire studio, and No. 5 also, vibrated.  As a rule Agg, the female Cerberus of the shanty, answered any summons from outside; but George hoped that to-night she would be absent; he knew by experience that on Sunday nights she usually paid a visit to her obstreperous family in Alexandra Grove.

The door was opened by a young man in a rich but torn and soiled eighteenth-century costume, and he looked, in the half-light of the entrance, as though he was just recovering from a sustained debauch.  The young man stared haughtily in silence.  Only after an appreciable hesitation did George see through the disguise and recover himself sufficiently to remark with the proper nonchalance: 

“Hallo, Agg!  What’s the meaning of this?”

“You’re before your time,” said she, shutting the door.

While he took off his overcoat Agg walked up the studio.  She made an astonishingly life-like young man.  George and Agg were now not unfriendly; but each constantly criticized the other in silence, and both were aware of the existence of this vast body of unspoken criticism.  Agg criticized more than George, who had begun to take the attitude that Agg ought to be philosophically accepted as incomprehensible rather than criticized.  He had not hitherto seen her in male costume, but he would not exhibit any surprise.

“Where’s Marguerite?” he inquired, advancing to the Stove and rubbing his hands above it.

“Restrain your ardour,” said Agg lightly.  “She’ll appear in due season.  I’ve told you—­you’re before your time.”

George offered no retort.  Despite his sharp walk, he was still terribly agitated and preoccupied, and the phenomena of the lamplit studio had not yet fully impressed his mind.  He saw them, including Agg, as hallucinations gradually turning to realities.  He could not be worried with Agg.  His sole desire was to be alone with Marguerite immediately, and he regarded the fancy costume chiefly as an obstacle to the fulfilment of that desire, because Agg could not depart until she had changed it for something else.

Then his gaze fell upon a life-size oil-sketch of Agg in the eighteenth-century male dress.  The light was bad, but it disclosed the sketch sufficiently to enable some judgment on it to be formed.  The sketch was exceedingly clever, painted in the broad, synthetic manner which Steer and Sickert had introduced into England as a natural reaction from the finicking, false exactitudes of the previous age.  It showed Agg, glass in hand, as a leering, tottering young drunkard in frills and velvet.  The face was odious, but it did strongly resemble Agg’s face.  The hair was replaced by a bag wig.