After amusing one of the robust young ladies for half an hour at prodigious cost, he found himself comparing their conversation with the talk he might have had in the time with Elfrida Bell, and a fresh sense of injury visited him at having been high-handedly debarred from that pleasure for so many weeks.

It staid with him and pricked him all the way to town next day.

He was a fool, he thought, to have missed the chance of meeting her upon the opening days of the London exhibitions; she was sure to have gone, if it were only to scoff, and her scoffing would have been so amusing to listen to.

He thought gloomily of the impossibility of finding her in London if she didn't wish to be found, and he concluded that he really wanted to see her, that he must see her soon--to show her that article.
The desire had not passed from him three days later, when the boy from below-stairs brought him up a card.

Kendal was in his shirt-sleeves, and had just established a relation of great intimacy with an entirely new subject.
Before the boy reached him he recognized with annoyance that it was a lady's card, and he took it between his thumb and his palette with the most brutal impatience.
"You are to say--" he began, and stopped.