He laughed also; for despite her contrariety her mirth was most infectious, and put him more at ease with her. It was the first glimpse of her natural self that she had vouchsafed him, and he liked it infinitely better than the half-aggressive dignity she assumed in her capacity of teacher.
“Do you think,” he ventured again after a pause, and with a decided increase of diffidence, “that I am likely to be any good at it?”
Jill took up a pencil and penknife with the intent to sharpen the former but laid them down again suddenly and looked him squarely in the face.
“If you mean have you any talent for art?” she said coolly, “I am afraid I cannot give you much encouragement. You have a liking for it, and, I should say, possess a certain amount of perseverance; therefore in time you ought to turn out some fairly decent work, but you have not talent.”
He looked displeased, and fell to contemplating his work anew from the distinctly irritating standpoint of its not being quite such a success as he had deemed it.
“You are very candid,” he remarked, not altogether gratefully; “I suppose I should feel obliged to you. But, to be frank in my turn, you would do well not to be quite so candid with your pupils; you will never get on if you are.”
She laughed, and shrugged her shoulders with a careless, half-bitter gesture.
“Your advice is rather superfluous,” she answered; “I am not likely to get any pupils.”
“Why not?” he queried. “You have one.”
“Very true,” she replied, “I had not forgotten that; it is too gigantic a fact to be overlooked. Nevertheless, as I believe I remarked before, the coals and the stairs are likely to prove too great odds; facts—even gigantic ones—have a way of vanishing before great personal discomfort.”