“Does he—is he the one that will call you Camaralzaman?”
Justin laughed too.
“Rum kid you were. Yes. He always enquires after the harem. He won’t know you again.”
Laura’s eyebrows were under no disabilities.
“Oh, because he’s here,” he answered them. “This letter’s been trotting after me for weeks. Wish I’d known. We might have been bummelling about together all this time,” he concluded regretfully.
“So we might!” Her tone matched his to a nicety.
“We must look him up first thing. Mother, you’ve got to come. You remember Oliver? It’s funny we’ve not run into him. He’s copying at the Uffizi.”
“Oh! He paints!” Laura ruffled up into the comically aggressive interest that an artist or a gamecock or a pretty woman will always display when a fellow professional is mentioned. “Is he any good?”
“‘Is he any good!’” Justin ruffled in his turn. He was always easily moved on behalf of his dearest friend of the hour and he had your plain man’s instinctive and unbounded admiration for the creative gift. He had also his naïve conviction that its obverse, the critical faculty, must nevertheless be in himself. “Of course, I don’t pretend to know anything about painting,” Justin would prepare you, “but I know what I like, you know!” But thus guided he was certainly safer than most, for he had an enviable habit of liking the right things. It was as if he proved all art with the touchstone of his own unconscious honesty. Now Laura could not help persuading herself to like what Justin liked because Justin liked it. She had resigned herself to admiring Oliver, though she was sure that she never should, before Justin had finished his eulogy.
“Whom is he under?” she demanded.