could pull him into shape again.

Mary Brinsley came swiftly down the path, trowel in one hand and her
basket of weeds in the other. Wilmer wondered if she had been glancing
up from some flowery screen and read the story of that altered posture.
She looked sharply anxious, like a mother whose child is threatened.
Jerome shrewdly knew that Marshby's telltale attitude was no unfamiliar
one.

"What have you been saying?" she asked, in laughing challenge, yet with
a note of anxiety underneath.

"I'm painting him in," said Wilmer; but as she came toward him he turned
the canvas dexterously. "No," said he, "no. I've got my idea from this.
To-morrow Marshby's going to sit."

That was all he would say, and Mary put it aside as one of his
pleasantries made to fit the hour. But next day he set up a big canvas
in the barn that served him as workroom, and summoned Marshby from his
books. He came dressed exactly right, in his every-day clothes that had
comfortable wrinkles in them, and easily took his pose. For all his
concern over the inefficiency of his life, as a life, he was entirely
without self-consciousness in his personal habit. Jerome liked that, and
began to like him better as he knew him more. A strange illuminative
process went on in his mind toward the man as Mary saw him, and more and
more he nursed a fretful sympathy with her desire to see Marshby tuned
up to some pitch that should make him livable to himself. It seemed a
cruelty of nature that any man should so scorn his own company and yet
be forced to keep it through an allotted span. In that sitting Marshby
was at first serious and absent-minded. Though his body was obediently