mother's eyes when she had spoken cryptically about "getting on."
And in his own room, as he undressed beside the easel that stood uselessly, its career ended, in a corner, he thought of the transformed Rhoda, her father's right hand man, going after contracts, receiving hardheaded architects and talking them into a cocked hat, dictating thirty letters every morning, short, pointed letters, and tapping her pencil on a mahogany desk-top as she thought of polite ways to jack up a slacking salesman, Rhoda commuting between Aldergrove and Boston with a copy of the Atlantic Monthly under her arm, which she would read not because she enjoyed it but because, being to her fingertips Bostonian, it was her mental duty to do so. Would she ever look pensively through her office window toward the dome of the State House and wonder what new paganisms he was wallowing in? Whenever he thought of Rhoda his mouth was filled with the bitter taste of the misapprehension she had carried away with her. For he had not been able to resist telling her, pent-up as he had been, something of his passion for Olga. And he had colored it in iridiscent tints; he had made a far prettier verbal picture of his love for the French girl than ever he had been able to contrive on canvas. That picture existed now only in Rhoda's mind; and there was no way of effacing it. It was just one of the damned blunders that life was forever leading you into. If his affair with Olga had only led to a con-
