“There! Keep that! Just that way!” Dorothy Sheridan called. “That’s very good. Very characteristic. No, just as you were. That’s right—relax a little.”
She gave him these orders from half way across the large studio room, where she stood in a brusque commanding attitude. Felix obeyed.
“One minute!” And she ran up the steps to the mezzanine behind and above Felix, and presently he heard from overhead the swish of falling cloth. He half turned, and saw that she had flung over the edge of the mezzanine railing a long piece of rose-coloured silk, which reached the floor behind him.
“That’s for a background,” she said, and Felix resumed his pose.
She came back, pushed out an easel not far from him and a little to one side, and then took up a position at a distance from both him and the easel, armed with a brown crayon. She looked at him intently, with wide eyes, bending a little, with head forward and face uplifted. “Mm,” she said, reflectively, and walked swiftly up to the easel and commenced to draw upon the blank canvas with swift, vigorous strokes of her crayon. After a little, she walked back to her former place, resumed her wide-eyed stare, and then returned once more to the canvas.
After half an hour of this, looking at her subject and drawing on the canvas in turn, she threw down her crayon. “Can you remember that pose?” she asked.
Of course Felix could remember it. It was a pose into which he fell naturally. “Yes,” he said. “May I look?”
“If you want to,” she said indifferently, taking off her apron.
Felix strolled over and looked at the crayon sketch on the canvas. It was a bold caricature of himself, poised hesitantly with stick and cigarette, blithe, debonair, and above all a figure of indecision. Was that himself?
“That’s all for today,” said the painter. “Same time, same day, next week. Don’t forget.”