But she, too, was thinking of herself.
“I can,” said Laura absently. And then, as he laughed—“I tell you I can, Justin! I tell you I can!”
“Can what?” Oliver came across to them with his hands full of fruit and green glasses and blue checked table-cloth, and sat himself down to butter rolls.
“Draw,” said Laura stiffly, her eyes on the fire-opal shoulder blade.
“Can you?” said Oliver in the soothing, interested voice that one uses to a child.
“Well, you may laugh,” she began, but ready to laugh herself, if Justin, with a vague notion that she was making herself look foolish and a still vaguer notion that he did not like Laura to look foolish, had not interposed too peremptorily——
“Oh, dry up, Laura! Let’s have lunch,” and so set a match to her discretion.
She flared. It was comical to hear the personal pique and righteous artistic wrath struggling for precedence in her harangue as she dragged out Oliver’s spare easel.
“You eat your lunches! Oliver, where’s the michallet? And charcoal? And a board? You two think you know everything. You think I’m a fool. You think there’s nothing on earth but colour. Oh, I’ll show you!” And then, as the familiar delight of handling familiar tools swept over her, she suddenly added, with complete if abstracted friendliness, “Oliver—keep him quiet, won’t you?”
“I’m hanged if you’re going to immortalize me,” began Justin. “Why not Oliver?”