‘I do not know,’ he replied. ‘I hardly know yet what I am going to do. But it is at any rate certain that I must do something.’

‘You mean about your profession?’ said she.

‘Yes, about my profession, if you can call it one.’

‘And is it not one?’ said Eleanor. ‘Were I a man, I know none I should prefer to it, except painting. And I believe the one is as much in your power as the other.’

‘Yes, just about equally so,’ said Bertie with a little touch of inward satire directed at himself. He knew in his heart that he would never make a penny by either.

‘I have often wondered, Mr Stanhope, why you do not exert yourself more,’ said Eleanor, who felt a friendly fondness for the man with whom she was walking. ‘But I know it is very impertinent in me to say so.’

‘Impertinent!’ said he. ‘Not so, but much too kind. It is much too kind in you to take an interest in so idle a scamp.’

‘And make busts of the bishop, dean and chapter? Or perhaps, if I achieve great success, obtain a commission to put up an elaborate tombstone over a prebendary’s widow, a dead lady with a Grecian nose, a bandeau, and an intricate lace veil; lying of course on a marble sofa, from among the legs of which Death will be creeping out and poking at his victim with a small toasting–fork.’

Eleanor laughed; but yet she thought that if the surviving prebendary paid the bill the object of the artist as a professional man would, in great measure, be obtained.

‘I don’t know about the dean and chapter and the prebendary’s widow,’ said Eleanor. ‘Of course you must take them as they come. But the fact of your having a great cathedral in which such ornaments are required, could not but be in your favour.’

‘No real artist could descend to the ornamentation of a cathedral,’ said Bertie, who had his ideas of the high ecstatic ambition of art, as indeed all artists have, who are not in receipt of a good income. ‘Building should be fitted to grace the sculpture, not the sculpture to grace the building.’

‘Yes, when the work of art is good enough to merit it. Do you, Mr Stanhope, do something sufficiently excellent, and we ladies of Barchester will erect for it a fitting receptacle. Come, what shall the subject be?’

‘I’ll put you in your pony–chair, Mrs Bold, as Dannecker put Ariadne on her lion. Only you must promise to sit for me.’

‘My ponies are too tame, I fear, and my broad–brimmed straw hat will not look so well in marble as the lace veil of the prebendary’s wife.’

‘If you will not consent to that, Mrs Bold, I will consent to try no other subject in Barchester.’

‘You are determined, then, to push your fortune in other lands?’

‘I am determined,’ said Bertie, slowly and significantly as he tried to bring up his mind to a great resolve; ‘I am determined in this matter to be guided wholly by you.’

‘Wholly by me!’ said Eleanor, astonished at, and not quite liking his altered manner.

‘Wholly by you,’ said Bertie, dropping his companion’s arm, and standing before her on the path. In their walk they had come exactly to the spot where Eleanor had been provoked into slapping Mr Slope’s face.