That was in the Carmunnock studio, now their securest meeting place. It was for long hours together there that Joanna particularly lived. Louis had taken it on a yearly tenancy; for though he went often to London and abroad, staying away for months on end, Glasgow had for the time become his working head-quarters. The first panel and lunette in the City chambers were finished some while ago, it was true, and it seemed doubtful whether he would be asked to do others there; but to his amused pleasure a brewer with a castle on Loch Lomond had commissioned him (having seen the panel) to decorate the ancestral billiard-room. Between whiles he painted some portraits of Glasgow people (including Mrs. Tullis, of whom Joanna was secretly jealous quite without cause) and in these portraits he experimented for the first time in realism. Whenever he wanted her, Joanna sat to him.

She lived for their hours together, but she lived – at any rate during that first year – with trepidation.

“My dear one! How nice you look to-day!” – If that were his greeting all was well. Louis would then be a god to her and a revelation. She loved the way he would speak of the wonders of the body. – “Every inch of you full of pores and ducts and odds and ends of things to make you live,” as he put it. And he made her see what a marvel of balance it was that one could stand upright. “I think myself, you know,” he had told her one day, looking at her very boyishly, “that a man has no right to go near a woman unless he feels, for the moment at least, that she’s a goddess. I certainly feel so for you. On my word, Joanna, every time we meet it is a fresh adventure and you show me a new charm.”

But it was not always like this with them. Joanna had learned to search his face swiftly as they met, and she kept the ears of a newt for his first utterance. She soon came to know and dread the comprehensive, slightly incredulous glance with which he could sum her up afresh. An unfortunate hat at such times could make him, it almost seemed, revise his whole opinion of her. And Joanna was not always happy in her hats. Once, in desperation at the prospect of a spoiled afternoon which she had read in his cool eyes, she had tossed the offending thing of straw and flowers high into a tree in the park where they had just met. But instead of sticking there, it had tumbled from branch to branch and down into the dust at their feet. And to her inexpressible mortification Louis, taking no pains to hide his annoyance, had made her put it on again.

And later on that same day he had ground her mercilessly between the mill-stones of his self-distrust and his rancour against life.