"I don't mean to let anybody else buy it; you can lay down your life on that."
There was so much earnestness in this declaration that Miss Follett laughed again. It was an easy, silvery laugh, pleasant to the ear, and not out of keeping with the medley of beautiful things round her.
"Jennie's value in a studio is more than that of a model," Wray had recently confided to his friend, Bob Collingham. "It's as if she extracted the beauty from every bit of tapestry or bronze and turned it into animate life."
"By doing nothing or standing still," Collingham had added, "she can pin your eyes on her as other girls can't by frisking about. And when she moves—"
An exclamation from Wray conveyed the fact that Jennie's motion was beyond what either of these young experts in womanhood could possibly put into words.
But that Jennie knew where to draw a certain kind of line became evident when, either by inadvertence or design, the back of Bob Collingham's hand rubbed along her cheek. With a smile at once kindly and cold she put away his arm and rose. In the few yards she placed between them before she turned again, still with her kind, cold smile, there was rebuke without offense.
Being fair, the young man colored easily. When he colored, the three inches of scar across his temple which he had brought home from the war became a streak of red. It was one of the reasons why Jennie, who was sensitive to the physical, didn't like to look at him. Not to look at him, she pretended to arrange the folds of her peplum, which kept her gaze downward.
But had she looked, she would have seen that he was hurt. His face was of the honest, sympathetic cast that quickly reflects the wounding of the feelings. If men had prototypes in dogs, Bob Collingham's would have been the mastiff or the St. Bernard—big, strong, devoted, slow to wrath, and with an almost comic humiliation at sound of a harsh word. Though there was no harsh word in Jennie's case, Bob was sure he detected a harsh thought. It hurt him the more for the reason that she was a model, while he had advantages of social consideration. Little as he would have been discourteous to a girl of his own station, he would have thought it unworthy of a cad to profit by Jennie's helplessness in a place like a studio.
"I hope you didn't think I was trying to be fresh."
Now that she felt herself secured by distance, she laughed again.