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"Ah, poor Mungold," Stanwell laughed. "If he lived the life of an anchorite he couldn't help painting pictures that would please Mrs. Millington." "Whereas you could," Kate interjected, raising her head from the ironing-board where, Sphinx-like, magnificent, she swung a splendid arm above her brother's shirts. "Oh, well, perhaps I shan't please her; perhaps I shall elevate her taste."
If it seemed to hit him he regarded it as deflected from its aim, and brushed it aside with a discreet gesture. A touch of comedy was lent to the situation by the fact that, till Kate Arran's coming, Mungold had always served as her brother's Awful Example.
Caspar rejoined; and Stanwell could only plead that, even in the cause of art, one could hardly kick a lady. "Ah, that's the worst of it. If the women get at you you're lost. You're young, you're impressionable, you won't mind my saying that you're not built for a stoic, and hang it, they'll coddle you, they'll enervate you, they'll sentimentalize you, they'll make a Mungold of you!"
Mungold paused, breathless with the rehearsal of his wrongs, and Stanwell said with a smile: "You know poor Caspar is terribly stiff on the purity of the artist's aim." "The artist's aim?" Mr. Mungold stared. "What is the artist's aim but to please isn't that the purpose of all true art? But his theories are so extravagant. I really don't know what I shall say to Mrs.
"Exactly like Boheme, really that crack in the wall is much more like a stage-crack than a real one just the sort of crack Mungold would paint if he were doing a Humble Interior." Mungold, the fashionable portrait-painter of the hour, was the favourite object of the younger men's irony. "It only needs Kate Arran to be borne in dying," Stanwell continued with a laugh.
"Why, when he wants money, hang it!" She drew a deep breath. "Money money? Has Caspar's example been nothing to you, then?" "It hasn't proved to me that I must starve while Mungold lives on truffles!" Again her face changed and she stirred uneasily, and then rose to her feet. "There is no occasion which can justify an artist's sacrificing his convictions!" she exclaimed.
She too was going out, drawn forth by the sudden radiance of the January afternoon. She met him with a smile which seemed the answer to his uncertainties, and he asked abruptly if she had time to take a walk with him. Yes; for once she had time, for Mr. Mungold was sitting with Caspar, and had promised to remain till she came in.
Or an Arthur Schracker I can do Schracker as well as Mungold," he added, turning around a small canvas at which a paint-pot seemed to have been hurled with violence from a considerable distance. Shepson ignored the allusion to Corot, but screwed his eyes at the picture.
But presently Arran began to suspect that the portrait was not as comminatory as he could have wished. Mungold, the most kindly of rivals, let drop a word of injudicious praise: the picture, he said, promised to be delightfully "in keeping" with the decorations of the ball-room, and the lady's gown harmonized exquisitely with the window-curtains.
Mungold had lately belied his ambitions by falling in love with Kate Arran; and with that gentle persistency which made him so wonderful in managing obstreperous infantile sitters, he had contrived to establish a precarious footing in her brother's studio. Part of his success was due to the fact that he could not easily think himself the object of a rebuff.
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