“You sounded as if you were going to say I had imposed on you enough,” she reproached, with an air of aggrieved suspicion that was perhaps a trifle overdone.
“What are you laughing at?”
“I?” cried she with the utmost innocence. “I feel like anything but laughing.”
He subsided. “Well, if you weren’t laughing you ought to have been.”
She rather disappointed him by refusing to take the bait. Instead of asking why, she returned to her original point. “Don’t you think pictures with figures in them—especially women—are more interesting than just grass and leaves and things?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Then you’ve got to have some model. Why not me? Haven’t I been giving satisfaction?”
“Indeed, you have. But I’ll get a model who isn’t so interesting to talk with—one who doesn’t demand such high pay. Time is the most valuable thing in the world.”
“Not mine. It’s dirt cheap.” She sighed. “I don’t know what I’ll do with myself when you get through with me,” she said dolefully. “I’ve always been restless before. I see now I was right in thinking it was because I didn’t have something to do—something useful.”
The subject dropped. While he was as inexpert as the next strongly masculine man in the ways of women, he had intuitions that more than replaced analysis. And there was something in her increasing tendency to reverie that made him uneasy—that made him wonder whether this idle child were not plotting some new device for stealing more of his time from his career. “She’ll get left, if she is,” he said to himself. But he continued to have qualms of nervousness. She was crafty, this innocent maiden; she was always taking him by surprise.