purely voluntary. On the occasion of her first visit the artist said so
little that Claudia was able to indulge to the full the harrowing sense of
her inadequacy. No wonder she had not been one of the few that he cared
to talk to; every word she uttered must so obviously have diminished the
inducement! She had been cheap, trivial, conventional; at once gushing
and inexpressive, eager and constrained. She could feel him counting the
minutes till the visit was over, and as the door finally closed on the
scene of her discomfiture she almost shared the hope with which she
confidently credited him--that they might never meet again.


II

Mrs. Davant glanced reverentially about the studio. "I have always said,"
she murmured, "that they ought to be seen in Europe."

Mrs. Davant was young, credulous and emotionally extravagant: she reminded
Claudia of her earlier self--the self that, ten years before, had first set
an awestruck foot on that very threshold.

"Not for _his_ sake," Mrs. Davant continued, "but for Europe's."

Claudia smiled. She was glad that her husband's pictures were to be
exhibited in Paris. She concurred in Mrs. Davant's view of the importance
of the event; but she thought her visitor's way of putting the case a
little overcharged. Ten years spent in an atmosphere of Keniston-worship
had insensibly developed in Claudia a preference for moderation of speech.
She believed in her husband, of course; to believe in him, with an
increasing abandonment and tenacity, had become one of the necessary laws
of being; but she did not believe in his admirers. Their faith in him was