She questioned him with a movement of her head.
“Love.” He wondered how she would take it.
“Why—” she began doubtfully, “why, of course——” And then, “Oh, Oliver, I believe you’re perfectly right!”
She laughed abstractedly, fingering her chalks. The suggestion had taken her fancy. It cleared up a hundred-and-one points for her. It explained so many failures and successes. Why, of course.... it was not the brains ... it was the being fond of people that counted, that made you able to do things, to look pretty, to be tidy, and paint, and get on with irritating people, like Oliver and Aunt Adela ... because you did it to please some one you were fond of.... It must be ghastly not to be fond of any one ... one would miss such a lot.... Oliver, for instance, was quite decent really, when you got to know him ... but she would never have bothered if it hadn’t been to please Justin ... a shame.... Poor Oliver!...
And so ended, a little guiltily, by smiling up at him.
And then, you know, he kissed her.
For myself, I don’t blame Oliver. In the spring—and after all, they had been discussing love. Besides, as he said to her some hectic moments later when, in sheer breathlessness, she allowed him to speak, where was the harm? Most girls liked that sort of thing. He felt ill-used. She was old enough to play the game ... to observe the rules that every girl, every human being, ought to know.... She was a little fool ... nothing in her after all ... nothing whatever....
For Laura, after one paralysed, open-mouthed moment, had risen in her wrath (literally risen—she sent the easels flying) and overwhelmed him: and while she told him, with impassioned accuracy, what she thought of him, and Oliver rose from the wreck to answer, for characteristically his first concern had been his canvas, she scrubbed her outraged cheek with her pocket-handkerchief; or it may have been her paint-rag, for there was little, in those days, to choose between them.
And that, curiously, infuriated Oliver. Mere angry words he was accustomed to discount, but all the irresistible apologies he had premeditated, all his assumption of savoir-faire, melted before the spectacle of that all too genuine disgust. There remained the raw juvenile, wanting to say: “Yah! suppose you think that’s funny!” like a small boy quarrelling with his sister.
What he said, however, and with intense dignity, was—