“Thank you very much. I don’t know about taking it, exactly—it’s much too generous of you.”
She knew what Crowdie’s work was worth, for he was a very successful man at portrait painting, and he had never seemed to care much for any other variety of the art. He was more or less of a specialist in his own department, but so far as he went, he brought an amount of experience and a richness of conception to bear upon what he did, which had carried him beyond most rivals. Possibly he had not in him the stuff which makes the greatest artists—the manly, ascetic, devoted nature which has in it a touch of the fanatic, the absolute concentration of all faculties upon a single but many-sided task. He was, in a way, the product of the age, an artist and a good one, but a specialist—an expert in the painting of portraits. All his gifts favoured and strengthened the tendency.
“I don’t see anything generous in offering you one of my daubs!” he laughed, in answer to what Katharine had said last. “Hester can’t find it—I knew it wasn’t where she said it was,” he added, after a short pause, during which he listened for his wife’s footstep.
“Please button the last button, too,” said Katharine, who had listened also, but had heard nothing. “You’re so awfully clever at it.”
“Am I?” he asked, still smiling. “This is evidently my day of grace and favour in your royal eyes.”
His beautiful voice had an inflection of something like tenderness in it, which displeased Katharine. She pushed his hands lightly with hers as he held it, to remind him of what he was doing.
“Please button it!” she said, a little imperiously, and looking at the button in question as she spoke, but quite conscious of his eyes.
He inclined his head dutifully, after gazing at her an instant longer, and then bent over the hand again and quietly slipped the button through the button-hole, touching it very delicately and in evident fear of tightening the glove so as to pinch her arm. Gloves with buttons chanced to be the fashion just then, in an interval between two fits of the Biarritz gauntlet. When he had performed the little operation, he glanced at each of the others in turn, touching each with his finger, while Katharine watched him carelessly. Then, before she could withdraw her hand, he bent his head a little more and lightly kissed the button at her wrist, releasing it instantly.
Katharine drew it back almost before he had let it go, with a quick movement of displeasure.
“Don’t do that!” she cried, in a low voice.