Her face clouded. Her head drooped, and her fingers intertwined.
“Steve,” she repeated. “I see. I—I was forgittin’ about Steve.”
She sank down and sat with her chin in her hands, soberly contemplating the passing water. He bent, picked up the paper, and forced his mind to concentrate on it. After a studious interval he nodded and looked thoughtfully at the tapering fingers which so recently had threatened his face.
“Er—ahem! Do you know, Miss Marion, that you have the rudiments of art? I’m no artist myself, but I know a little about it. How did you ever come to draw like this? And why didn’t you want me to see it?”
She looked up, but in a detached way. Then her eyes returned to the creek.
“’Most everybody makes fun of my pictures,” she said, as if only part of her mind were talking. “I dunno what you mean by rood—roody—what you said about art. But I like to draw; it comes natural. I git spells when I jest have to draw things. That’s what got me throwed out of school. I’d draw pictures and teacher would catch me and tear ’em up—and one day I ’most tore him up too: I flew and scratched his face, and I got put out, and that was the end of my schoolin’. I don’t care. I don’t want to go to school and work onto figgers and have ’em make fun of me ’cause my hair’s red and my pop’s a nigger and all. I’d ruther go off by my own self and make pictures into the woods and rocks.
“There was an artist feller in here two-three years back—they come round sometimes—and I watched how he worked and tried to do like it, and when he see what I was up to he laughed and laughed and—I can’t stand to be laughed at! I thought you’d laugh too, soon as you see what I made onto that paper.”
He said nothing for a time. He pondered on her work, studied her again, and sighed.
“Too bad,” he thought. “She has real ability, if it could be developed. And to think that she’s the offspring of such animals as ‘them Oakses’!”
Marion spoke again.