“You don’t like them?” she asked at a venture.
The only thing he liked in all that dusty-aired attic was the slender, stooping figure with its aura of repressed ardencies. But this, he knew, was not the time to say so.
“How do you feel about them?” he countered, watching her as she turned toward him and absently rubbed her fingers together. It struck him at first as a movement of repudiation, but he remembered that it was merely an effort to remove the attic dust from her hands.
“It’s hard to explain,” was her answer. “Some of them I dislike and some of them I can’t understand, and there are a few of them I almost hate.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t think I could make it clear to you,” was all she said.
He saw no light through the blind wall of his dilemma, and he could not quite see how the first move was to be made. So he asked, in a merciful effort at postponement: “What pictures were taken from this collection?”
“My father took the ones he liked when he went away the last time. He took them all but one.” She had misunderstood him.
“No; you spoke of your Aunt Georgina carrying some of them downstairs when she fell,” he reminded her. “What were they, besides the Bouguereau?”
She met his glance courageously in the clear light that flooded them.