“Not mine. It’s dirt cheap.” She sighed. “I don’t know what I’ll do with myself when you get through with me,” she said dolefully. “I’ve always been restless before. I see now I was right in thinking it was because I didn’t have something to do—something useful.” The subject dropped. While he was as inexpert as the next strongly masculine man in the ways of women, he had intuitions that more than replaced analysis. And there was something in her increasing tendency to reverie that made him uneasy—that made him wonder whether this idle child were not plotting some new[72] device for stealing more of his time from his career. “She’ll get left, if she is,” he said to himself. But he continued to have qualms of nervousness. She was crafty, this innocent maiden; she was always taking him by surprise. [72] There came a stage in his work when it did not especially matter whether he had a model or not. He let her continue to come, however—while he evolved how best to effect the separation. He felt certain she was simply making use of him in whiling away leisure hours that would otherwise bore her; still, courtesy demanded that, in ridding himself of her, he show consideration for her. After all, she had been most valuable to him, had helped him to make what he hoped would be regarded as far and away the best picture he had ever produced. “Never again!” he swore solemnly. “Never again will I work with anyone I can’t pay off and discharge. Free labor is the most expensive. Something for nothing takes the shirt off your back when you come to pay.” She was posing in her canoe, well out from the shore. He was laboring at an effect of luminous shadow that would better bring out the poetry he had been striving to put into the expression of her face. A slight sound made him glance at the other shore of the[73] lake—about two hundred yards away, in that little bay. At a point where his model’s back was full toward them, two young men were standing staring at her. The expression of their faces, of their bodies, made them a living tableau of the phrase, “rooted to the spot.” At first glance he was angered by their impertinence; but directly came an intuition that something out of the ordinary was about to happen. Swift upon the intuition followed its realization. One of the young men—the shorter, much the shorter—shouted in a voice of angry amazement: [73] “Beatrice!” That shout acted upon Roger’s model like the shot from a gun it so strongly
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