Kendal, as the door closed behind Elfrida on the afternoon of her last sitting, shutting him in with himself and the portrait on the easel, and the revelation she had made, did his best to feel contrition, and wondered that he was so little successful.

He assured himself that he had been a brute; yet in an uncompromising review of all that he had ever said or done in connection with Elfrida he failed to satisfy his own indignation with himself by discovering any occasion upon which his brutality had been particularly obvious.

He remembered with involuntary self-justification how distinctly she had insisted upon _camaraderie_ between them, how she had spurned everything that savored of another standard of manners on his, part, how she had once actually had the curious taste to want him to call her "old chap," and how it had grated.

He remembered her only half-veiled invitation, her challenge to him to see as much as he cared, and to make what he could of her.

He was to blame for accepting, but he would have been a conceited ass if he had thought of the danger of a result like this.