"I want it to be simple addition," said Betty. "Lady St. Craye is very beautiful."
"Yes," said Vernon.
"Is she in love with you?"
"Ask her," said Vernon, feeling like a schoolboy in an examination.
"If she were--and you cared for her--then you and I could be friends: I should like to be real friends with you."
"Let us be friends," said he when he had paused a moment. He made the proposal with every possible reservation.
"Really?" she said. "I'm so glad."
If there was a pang, Betty pretended to herself that there was none. If Vernon's conscience fluttered him he was able to soothe it; it was an art that he had studied for years.
"Say, you two!"
The voice of Miss Voscoe fell like a pebble into the pool of silence that was slowly widening between them.
"Say--we're going to start a sketch-club for really reliable girls. We can have it here, and it'll only be one franc an hour for the model, and say six sous each for tea. Two afternoons a week. Three, five, nine of us--you'll join, Miss Desmond?"
"Yes--oh, yes!" said Betty, conscientiously delighted with the idea of more work.
"That makes--nine six sous and two hours model--how much is that, Mr. Temple?--I see it written on your speaking brow that you took the mathematical wranglership at Oxford College."
"Four francs seventy," said Temple through the shout of laughter.
"Have I said something comme il ne faut pas?" said Miss Voscoe.
"You couldn't," said Vernon: "every word leaves your lips without a stain upon its character."
"Won't you let us join?" asked an Irish student. "You'll be lost entirely without a Lord of Creation to sharpen your pencils."
"We mean to work," said Miss Voscoe; "if you want to work take a box of matches and a couple of sticks of brimstone and make a little sketch class of your own."
"I don't see what you want with models," said a very young and shy boy student. "Couldn't you pose for each other, and--"
A murmur of dissent from the others drove him back into shy silence.
"No amateur models in this Academy," said Miss Voscoe. "Oh, we'll make the time-honoured institutions sit up with the work we'll do. Let's all pledge ourselves to send in to the Salon--or anyway to the Indépendants! What we're suffering from in this quarter's git-up-and-git. Why should we be contented to be nobody?"