“I am fortunate to find you disengaged,” he said.
“I should be fortunate if you had found me otherwise,” Jill answered ruefully, but he did not smile; probably he considered her flippant.
“I read your advertisement in the paper a short while since,” he continued gravely, “and came to—” he hesitated, and glanced round the room till his eye fell upon the canvas on which she was engaged, and the sight of it seemed to decide him, “to enquire your terms. I wish to study act.”
Jill gasped. She had never connected him for a moment with the advertisement; this was not the sort of applicant that she had expected at all; the mere idea of teaching this dreadfully big young man appalled her. Apparently the incongruity of the situation did not appeal to him, or perhaps he was too much engrossed with the main object to think of anything else; for he went on quite coolly as though her acceptance of him as a pupil were a foregone conclusion.
“I have long wanted to take up art as a hobby for leisure moments, but I have never had the pluck to go to one of the big studios as I know absolutely nothing, and I’m not quite sure, dubiously, whether I have much talent that way.”
“That is soon proved,” she answered. “But you will never do anything at it if you intend only to make a ‘hobby’ of it.”
He smiled.
“You think the term ill-advised?” he said.
“I think it inapplicable.”
“And when shall I come?” he asked. “To-morrow?”