bored me a good deal; but the very fact that they bored me admonished
me not to sacrifice them--if there was anything to be done with them-
-simply to irritation. As I look back at this phase they seem to me
to have pervaded my life not a little. I have a vision of them as
most of the time in my studio, seated, against the wall, on an old
velvet bench to be out of the way, and looking like a pair of patient
courtiers in a royal ante-chamber. I am convinced that during the
coldest weeks of the winter they held their ground because it saved
them fire. Their newness was losing its gloss, and it was impossible
not to feel that they were objects of charity. Whenever Miss Churm
arrived they went away, and after I was fairly launched in "Rutland
Ramsay" Miss Churm arrived pretty often. They managed to express to
me tacitly that they supposed I wanted her for the low life of the
book, and I let them suppose it, since they had attempted to study
the work--it was lying about the studio--without discovering that it
dealt only with the highest circles. They had dipped into the most
brilliant of our novelists without deciphering many passages. I
still took an hour from them, now and again, in spite of Jack
Hawley's warning: it would be time enough to dismiss them, if
dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the season was
over. Hawley had made their acquaintance--he had met them at my
fireside--and thought them a ridiculous pair. Learning that he was a
painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were
the real thing; but he looked at them, across the big room, as if
they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything that he
most objected to in the social system of his country. Such people as
that, all convention and patent-leather, with ejaculations that
stopped conversation, had no business in a studio. A studio was a
place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of
feather beds?