“You needn’t go on,” she said, interrupting me. “It couldn’t be, of course, and, if I appeared to listen, it was only in jest. Besides, I couldn’t afford it.”
I did not answer to that, because I knew what was in her mind. But the idea which had come into my own remained there to germinate. This hole and corner existence was already figuring as irksome in the light of that wider prospect, and the nomadic instinct in me began immediately to stir and stretch its limbs, like an unswaddled infant laid to kick on its nurse’s lap.
“Very well,” I said: “we will drop the subject for the time being. Are these things making my methods and principles any clearer to you?”
She shook her head forlornly.
“I am very sorry,” she said.
“You want your Ronsin back?”
“Or something in its place. I know you can if you will, Felix. It is only perversity that prevents you. Do, to please me, paint something I can understand.”
“But that I cannot? Well, shall I paint you, Fifine?”
“Like these?”
“No, like that?”