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Rh ter the beautiful and the ideal? Do you think even they'd be better fun to draw, not to say talk to?"

"No, I don't think so, and that's not what I meant. I daresay tramps are more interesting to talk to and even to draw than conventional people—at least for you. You're so curious about 'life'! How young you seem to me! How old are you, anyway?"

"Thirty," said Basil, dropping down again on the couch and taking his second cup of tea.

"And I'm thirty-two. I was married at twenty. I feel about fifty. … If you'd had my experience you wouldn't think the ugly tragic things of life beautiful, or make pictures of them."

She looked tragic, her intense eyes fixed on his face. Above all, she looked confidential. It was not her first confidence. She perhaps enjoyed this situation more than Basil, but he was interested. The stuff of human life, the story, the type, appealed to him keenly under whatever form he met it, and he was apt to requite warmly whatever of interest people gave him in this way. But it was an intellectual and not an emotional warmth; and, though it might burn with a keen and deceptive flame for the time, not to be counted upon for steadiness.

Of the sort of interest that Mrs. Perry wanted to awaken in him, there was as yet, if she had