“Yes,” said Dolly; and then, half unconsciously and quite in spite of herself, the ghost of a sigh escaped her. She could not help wishing things were a trifle more real sometimes, bright and whimsically unworldly as she was.
“What did that mean?” Griffith asked her.
She wakened up, as it were, and looked as happy as ever in an instant, creeping a trifle closer to him in her loving anxiety to blind him to the presence of the little pain in her heart.
“Nothing,” she said, briskly. And then—"We don't want much, do we, Griffith?”
“No,” said Griffith, a certain grim sense of humor getting the better of him. “And we have n't got it.”
She laughed outright at the joke quite enjoyably. Even the grimmest of jocosities wins its measure of respect in Vagabondia, and besides, her laugh removed the impression her sigh might have created. She was herself again at once.
“Never mind,” she said. (It was always “never mind.”) “Never mind, it will all come right in the end. Humble merit must be rewarded, and if humble merit isn't, we can only console ourselves with the reasonable reflection that there must be something radically wrong with the state of society. Who knows whether you may not 'get into something,' as Phil says, which may be twenty times better than anything Old Flynn can give you!” with characteristic Vagabondian hopefulness.
Just at this juncture Phil himself entered, or, rather, half entered, for he only put his head—a comely, curled head surmounted by a disreputable velvet cap—half into the room.
“Oh, you are here, are you?” he said. “You are the fellow I want. I am just touching up something I want to show you. Come into the studio for a minute or so, Grif.”
“It is that picture Mollie sat for,” he explained, as they followed him into the big, barren room, dignified by the name of studio. “I have just finished it.”