“No, no,” he cried; “if you stand like that, you look like an elderly St. Sebastian, and, with your hand on the table, you look like a railway director. Look here, walk out of the room, come in whistling, and sit down. I am not going to paint you portrait, you are not going to be photographed. Just pretend I’m not here.”
This went better, and soon, with inarticulate gruntings, Evelyn began to put in the lines of the figure with charcoal. At first he laboured, but before long things began to go more smoothly; his own knitted brow uncreased itself, and his hand began to work of itself. Then came a half hour in which he talked, telling his sitter of his visit to the Hermit, and the really charming days he had spent in the Forest. But that again suggested a train of thought which caused silence again and a renewal of the creased brow. But it was not at his sketch that he frowned.
Eventually he laid his tools down.
“I can’t go on any more,” he said. “Thanks very much! It’s all right.”
He wandered to the chimney-piece, lit a cigarette, and came back again.
“You mean Miss Ellington doesn’t want to give me any more sittings, don’t you?” he said. “For it is childish to expect me to believe that she can’t spare one hour between now and the end of the month.”
The childishness of that struck Philip too.
“But I ask you not to touch it any more, except of course the background,” he said. “Won’t that content you?”
“Not in the least. It is not the real reason.”
Philip was cornered, and knew it.