I still took an hour from them, now and again, in spite of Jack Hawley's warning: it would be time enough to dismiss them, if dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the season was over.

Hawley had made their acquaintance--he had met them at my fireside--and thought them a ridiculous pair.

Learning that he was a painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he looked at them across the big room, as if they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything he most objected to in the social system of his country.

Such people as that, all convention and patent-leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no business in a studio.

A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of feather-beds?
The main inconvenience I suffered at their hands was that at first I was shy of letting it break upon them that my artful little servant had begun to sit to me for "Rutland Ramsay." They knew I had been odd enough--they were prepared by this time to allow oddity to artists--to pick a foreign vagabond out of the streets when I might have had a person with whiskers and credentials; but it was some time before they learned how high I rated his accomplishments.