He had squatted in a corner of the room and had looked from her to the picture without saying a word. Even in those days he had affected a white tie. He had behaved in a like manner with another model she knew.

‘But doesn’t he himself ever paint?’

‘Who do you think would be rash enough to stand in front of him in the nude?’

Ginia would have liked to have another look at Guido’s pictures because she knew that the colours would only be seen properly by daylight. If she could have been sure that Rodrigues was out, she would have taken her courage in both hands and gone there alone. She pictured herself going upstairs, knocking at the door and finding Guido in his soldier’s trousers and laughing at him, to break the ice. The attractive thing about him as a painter was that he did not seem like a painter at all. Ginia remembered how he had held out his hand with an encouraging smile, and then his voice in the dark room and his face when the light was turned up and he had looked at her as if they were a couple on their own, nothing to do with the others. But Guido would not be there now and she would have to cope with the other man.

Next day at the café she asked Amelia whether Guido would at any rate be off duty on Sunday. ‘A while back you could have asked me’, said Amelia, ‘but I’ve not seen him for some time now’. ‘Rodrigues has invited me to his studio whenever I care to go’. ‘You want to look out!’ said Amelia.

But for several days they did not see him at the café. ‘What do you bet he’s expecting us to go and look him out, now that he has a bed available, just to create and to see us again? It would be just like him’, said Amelia.

‘It’s a mess’, said Ginia.

Thinking it over in her mind, she was convinced that Amelia’s action of getting into bed and turning out the light in front of the others was not after all such a shame-faced business; Guido and Rodrigues had scarcely taken any notice of it. What worried her was the thought of what Amelia might have done on that bed in the old days when Guido had been the sole tenant.

‘How old is Guido?’ she asked.

‘He used to be the same age as me’.

But Rodrigues was not to be seen, and one morning while she was out shopping, Ginia passed down the street of that night. Looking up, she recognized the triangular façade of the studio. Without giving it much thought, she ran up the staircase – which seemed endless – but when she had got into the last corridor, she saw various doors and was unable to decide which was his. She realized that Guido couldn’t be very important – there wasn’t even a visiting card pinned on his door, and as she went down again, she thought sympathetically of him having to have the glaring lamp of that evening which must be a handicap as far as a painter was concerned. She made no reference to her visit next time she saw Amelia.

One day when they were chatting, she asked her why men became artists. ‘Because some people buy pictures’, retorted Amelia. ‘Not all’, said Ginia, ‘what about the pictures that nobody buys?’

‘It’s a matter of taste like any other job’, said Amelia. ‘But they don’t get much to eat’.

‘They paint because they get satisfaction out of it’, said Ginia.

‘Listen here, would you make yourself a dress if you weren’t going to wear it? Rodrigues is the sly one: he gives himself out as a painter but nobody’s ever seen a paint-brush in his hand!’

That day in point of fact he was at the café, drawing in a sketch-book with great concentration. ‘What are you drawing?’ asked Amelia and took the book from him. Ginia had a glance, too, full of curiosity, but all she could see was an intricate network of lines which might have been a man’s bronchial tubes. ‘What is it? A lettuce?’ asked Amelia. Rodrigues said neither yes nor no, and then they turned over the pages of the sketch-book, which was filled with drawings; some looked like skeletons of plants, some like faces without any eyes, only areas of black hatching, and others, you could not tell whether they were faces or landscapes.

‘They are subjects seen at night by gaslight’, said Amelia. Rodrigues laughed and Ginia felt embarrassed rather than irritated.

‘Nothing worth looking at here’, said Amelia, ‘if you made me look like that in a portrait, I’d cut you dead’.

Rodrigues looked at her but said nothing.

‘A good model is wasted on you’, said Amelia. ‘Where the dickens do you find models?’

‘I don’t use models’, said Rodrigues, ‘I’ve too great a respect for my materials’.

At this point Ginia told him she would like to see Guido’s pictures again. Rodrigues replaced his sketch-book in his pocket and replied, ‘At your service’. The result was that they went along the first available Sunday and Ginia missed a part of mass to be in time. They had agreed to meet in the porch but Ginia found no one there and so she went upstairs alone. Once again she hesitated among the four doors of the corridor, could not decide which one it was, and descended half the staircase, then decided she was being stupid and went up again and stood listening in front of the last door.