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"Please."

"You will not mistake me, I am sure. Will you?"

She turned her pretty face toward him.

"I don't think so," she said after a moment. The starlight was meddling with her eyes again.

XIV

So Brown told her about his theory; how he desired to employ a model, how he desired to study her; what were his ideas of the terms suitable.

He talked fluently, earnestly, and agreeably; and his pretty audience listened with so much apparent intelligence and good taste that her very attitude subtly exhilarated Brown, until he became slightly aware that he was expressing himself eloquently.

He had, it seemed, much to say concerning the profession and practice of good literature. It seemed, too, that he knew a great deal about it, both theoretically and practically. His esteem and reverence for it were unmistakable; his enthusiasm worthy of his courage.

He talked for a long while, partly about literature, partly about himself. And he was at intervals a trifle surprised that he had so much to say, and wondered at the valuable accumulations of which he was unburdening himself with such vast content.

The girl had turned her back to the lagoon and stood leaning against the coquina wall, facing him, her slender hands resting on the coping.

Never had he had such a listener. At the clubs and cafés other literary men always wanted to talk. But here under the great southern stars nobody interrupted the limpid flow of his long dammed eloquence. And he ended leisurely, as he had begun, yet auto-intoxicated, thrillingly conscious of the spell which he had laid upon himself, upon his young listener – conscious, too, of the spell that the soft air and the perfume and the stars had spun over a world grown suddenly and incredibly lovely and young.

She said in a low voice: "I need the money very much… And I don't mind your studying me."

"Do you really mean it?" he exclaimed, enchanted.

"Yes. But there is one trouble."

"What is it?" he asked apprehensively.

"I must have my mornings to myself."

He said: "Under the terms I must be permitted to ask you any questions I choose. You understand that, don't you?"

"Yes," she said.

"Then – why must you have your mornings to yourself?"

"I have work to do."

"What work? What are you?"

She flushed a trifle, then, accepting the rules of the game, smiled at Brown.

"I am a school-teacher," she said. "Ill health from overwork drove me South to convalesce. I am trying to support myself here by working in the mornings."

"I am sorry," he said gently. Then, aware of his concession to a very human weakness, he added with businesslike decision: "What is the nature of your morning's work?"

"I – write," she admitted.

"Stories?"

"Yes."

"Fiction?"

"Anything, Mr. Brown. I send notes to fashion papers, concerning the costumes at the Hotel Verbena; I write for various household papers special articles which would not interest you at all. I write little stories for the women's and children's columns in various newspapers. You see what I do is not literature, and could not interest you."

"If you are to act for me in the capacity of a model," he said firmly, "I am absolutely bound to study every phase of you, every minutest detail."

"Oh."

"Not one minute of the day must pass without my observing you," he said. "Unless you are broad-minded enough to comprehend me you may think my close and unremitting observation impertinent."

"You don't mean to be impertinent, I am sure," she faltered, already surprised, apprehensive, and abashed by the prospect.

"Of course I don't mean to be impertinent," he said smilingly, "but all great observers pursue their studies unremittingly day and night – "

"You couldn't do that!" she exclaimed.

"No," he admitted, troubled, "that would not be feasible. You require, of course, a certain amount of slumber."

"Naturally," she said.

"I ought," he said thoughtfully, "to study that phase of you, also."

"What phase, Mr. Brown?"

"When you are sleeping."

"But that is impossible!"

"Convention," he said disdainfully, "makes it so. A literary student is fettered.

"But it is perfectly possible for you to imagine what I look like when I'm asleep, Mr. Brown."

"Imagination is to play no part in my literary work," he said coldly. "What I set down are facts."

"But is that art?"

"There is more art in facts than there are facts in art," he said.

"I don't quite know what you mean."

He didn't, either, when he came to analyse what he had said; and he turned very red and admitted it.

"I mean to be honest and truthful," he said. "What I just said sounded clever, but meant nothing. I admit it. I mean to be perfectly pitiless with myself. Anything tainted with imagination; anything hinting of romance; any weak concession to prejudice, convention, good taste, I refuse to be guilty of. Realism is what I aim at; raw facts, however unpleasant!"

"I don't believe you will find anything very unpleasant about me," she said.