“Yes, I think you would look better,” said Richard simply. “But you must not do that until my picture is finished. Seriously, if you want admiration, you should come to Paris. You are quite sure to find someone there who will think you are beautiful.”
She bit her lip, and asked herself if Richard could have told her more plainly, to her face, that he did not think so.
“He does not care for me,” she said to herself as she walked home the following afternoon, after the last sitting. “Had he cared for me, he would have said something nice to me when he said good-bye. He is only amused, and contemptuous. Thank Heaven I did not show him any of my drawings!”
For she had taken out her drawing book that morning, to try her hand at fashion plates, and had sat a long while examining her old careful sketches of a dead-nettle in flower and a spray of honeysuckle in bud, only to put them away at last guessing that her work would not make Richard Sotheby take her any more seriously, though an ambition to earn her living by drawing clothes was still present in her mind.
“Yet he likes me, I am sure of that,” she said. “He would not tease me otherwise.” The thought consoled her, and she crossed the green more happily. Suddenly she heard a little cry behind her, a sharp note like the clink of flint on steel, and looking round she saw Rachel.
“Will you come to tea to-morrow?” the child asked when she had overtaken her. “It is my birthday and mother told me I might ask anyone that I liked.”
NINE: BIRTHDAY TEA
Anne sat down to tea on the following afternoon, with the four Sothebys, round an iced cake with thirteen candles, in the rather dark little room where she had retired to hide her tears after Plough Monday, darker now, for it was raining outside. There were chocolate biscuits in glass dishes and crackers lying on the table between the plates. But in spite of the air of jollity, and of Rachel’s excitement, Anne felt just as she had done on the first occasion she had entered the room: anxious to escape.
Rachel had met her at the door, they had kissed, and she had given the little girl a pair of fur-lined slippers as a birthday present, but immediately afterwards Mrs. Sotheby had begun to introduce her to Richard and he had no sooner cut his mother short by saying that they were acquainted already, when the grocer came up and said: “Miss Dunnock, this is my son Richard of whom I think I have spoken to you....”
“Miss Dunnock and I have met,” said Richard, and Anne added: “Richard and I are old friends already,” but at once became aware that what she said was the wrong thing, for there was an expression of astonishment, almost of alarm, possibly even of disapproval, on Mr. Sotheby’s face. Certainly he seemed nervous as he said: “Well, well, since I find we are all acquainted let us sit down to tea.”