"But the woman with the chains, why don't you finish her at least?"
He burst into mocking laughter at himself, and threw himself full length on the fur-covered couch which stood in the darkest corner of the large glass-walled room. Then he jumped up, and offered Lilly some of the ginger from the pot he always kept on hand.
She declined, and pressed him for an answer.
"Good Lord," he said, "don't you realise how heavily one's own chains weigh one down? Fire would have to descend from heaven and melt my manacles. Or else the goddess herself would have to come down, lay her corset and stockings on that chair there, and say: 'Here I am, sir. Here is the foam-born body. Begin--look and paint to your heart's content.'"
Still chewing ginger he took his stand in front of Lilly and raised his clasped hands up to her.
"You look at me so oddly," she said, "what have _I_ to do with all that!"
"I'm not saying anything," he exclaimed. "I have too much contemptible respect to--. But when my chain-laden beauty shall have cried for freedom long enough--she cries day and night, sometimes she cries so I can't sleep--then, perhaps, the miracle will happen, and a certain lady, who is now blushing even unto her eyeballs, will come and--"
"I think we'd better get to work," said Lilly.
After that day Lilly took good care not to speak of the picture, nor even give it a sidelong glance if she thought Mr. Kellermann might see her. Nevertheless he made many beseeching allusions to his presumptuous desire, which he seemed unable to dismiss from his mind. Finally Lilly had to forbid his ever referring to it.
Her zeal for learning increased daily. The hours in the studio did not suffice. She practiced at home as well. And when she tried her skill on the glass plates she had bought, the result, in her and Mrs. Laue's opinion, was highly commendable.
In the background the sun set in the prescribed manner in a sea of blood over hilltops of a robin's egg blue. In the foreground stood woods, dark and silent, of grass and ferns, belonging anywhere between the Jurassic and Carboniferous ages, shading huts festively lighted from within, constructed by a race of men who must have acquired culture at an extremely early period in the world's history.