The fit was on me, however, and I couldn't let my ardour cool and my work wait, with the fading daylight, while my model prepared it.So I asked Mrs.Monarch if she would mind laying it out--a request which, for an instant, brought all the blood to her face.Her eyes were on her husband's for a second, and some mute telegraphy passed between them.Their folly was over the next instant; his cheerful shrewdness put an end to it.So far from pitying their wounded pride, I must add, I was moved to give it as complete a lesson as Icould.They bustled about together and got out the cups and saucers and made the kettle boil.I know they felt as if they were waiting on my servant, and when the tea was prepared I said: "He'll have a cup, please--he's tired." Mrs.Monarch brought him one where he stood, and he took it from her as if he had been a gentleman at a party, squeezing a crush-hat with an elbow.
Then it came over me that she had made a great effort for me--made it with a kind of nobleness--and that I owed her a compensation.Each time I saw her after this I wondered what the compensation could be.
I couldn't go on doing the wrong thing to oblige them.Oh, it WASthe wrong thing, the stamp of the work for which they sat--Hawley was not the only person to say it now.I sent in a large number of the drawings I had made for "Rutland Ramsay," and I received a warning that was more to the point than Hawley's.The artistic adviser of the house for which I was working was of opinion that many of my illustrations were not what had been looked for.Most of these illustrations were the subjects in which the Monarchs had figured.
Without going into the question of what HAD been looked for, I saw at this rate I shouldn't get the other books to do.I hurled myself in despair upon Miss Churm, I put her through all her paces.I not only adopted Oronte publicly as my hero, but one morning when the Major looked in to see if I didn't require him to finish a figure for the Cheapside, for which he had begun to sit the week before, I told him that I had changed my mind--I would do the drawing from my man.At this my visitor turned pale and stood looking at me."Is HE your idea of an English gentleman?" he asked.
I was disappointed, I was nervous, I wanted to get on with my work;so I replied with irritation: "Oh, my dear Major--I can't be ruined for YOU!"He stood another moment; then, without a word, he quitted the studio.
I drew a long breath when he was gone, for I said to myself that Ishouldn't see him again.I had not told him definitely that I was in danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of our fruitless collaboration, the lesson that, in the deceptive atmosphere of art, even the highest respectability may fail of being plastic.
