“I should imagine so,” said Pocket, smiling.
Dr. Baumgartner was smiling too, and still less coldly than before, but yet darkly to himself, and at the boy rather than with him.
“You take portraits of your friends, perhaps?”
“Yes; often.”
“In the body, I presume?”
Pocket looked nonplussed.
“You only take them in the flesh?”
“Of course.”
“Exactly! I take the spirit,” said the doctor; “that’s the difference.”
Pocket watched the now wonderfully genial countenance of Baumgartner follow the brutal features of the meerschaum Turk through a melting cloud of smoke. The boy had been taken aback. But his bewilderment was of briefer duration than might have been the case with a less ardent photographer; for he took a technical interest in his hobby, and read the photographic year-books, nearly as ravenously as Wisden’s Almanacke.