“My dear Tom, I am saying it neither to please you nor myself. I don’t like Greek things, you know.”
May turned on him gravely.
“Surely it is admirable?” she asked.
“It is admirable surely,” replied Manvers, “but it is my nature not to admire it. You should hear Tom heap abuse on my little things. His tongue was an unruly member whenever he looked at La Dame qui s’amuse,—by the way, she is finished, Tom. It would have pleased him in what he calls his unregenerate days, and I his Paradisiacal days, before the fall.”
“We’ve got a little statuette of his downstairs which I’ll show you,” said May. “It is of a boy shooting. He never quite finished it.”
“That beast of a thing which was in my room at Applethorpe?” said Tom. “I shall smash it.”
“No, dear, you won’t: you gave it me. I shall go and get it.”
“No, it shan’t come up here,” said Tom. “We’ll all go down. This Temple is no place for Manvers.”
But Manvers was interested, and he stayed some minutes more, advising, suggesting, and praising. It was as impossible for him not to admire the prodigious skill of the work, as it was not to dislike the spirit of it. The whole thing he regarded as a most lamentable waste of time and skill which might have been most profitably employed.
But before the statuette of the boy shooting his praise was of a very different order. It was thoroughly modern, and though not ugly, was undeniably pretty. The figure represented a lad in volunteer uniform, lying on the ground, shooting, or rather aiming, with a rifle. The head was bent over to the back-sight of the gun, the mouth slightly open, one eye shut, and one leg lightly crossing the other just above the ankle. The thing was marvellously fresh and unstudied. May claimed it as her possession, and showed it with just pride. Tom really had succeeded, as he had vowed he would, in making trousers beautiful.