"Have you never met anybody since, Mac, you cared for?" I had braced myself for that question, wondering how he would take it.
"Yes, once, but she never knew it. I had nothing—why begin over again? It would have turned out like the other—worse. Then I was too young, now I'm too old. Besides, she's on the other side of the water; lives there."
"She liked you?"
"Oh, I don't know. Women are hard to understand. I never abuse their confidence when they trust me, and they generally do trust me when I get close to them. I seem always to be the big brother to them and so they let themselves go, knowing I won't misunderstand. Women like me, they don't love me—great difference. A lot of men make this mistake, thinking a woman is in love with them when she only wants to be kind. She can't always be on the defensive and still be natural. The greatest relief that can come to one of them is to find that the man whom she wants only as a companion is contented to be that and nothing more and won't take advantage of her confidence. So I say I don't know. She was a human kind of a girl, this one—real human."
Here Mac paused for an instant, his eyes on the fast-dying embers—as if he were recalling the girl more clearly to his mind. "Had a heart for things outside of her own affairs. Girl a man could tie up to. Human, I tell you—real human!"
"Follow it up, Mac?" He had volunteered nothing about her personality, and I dared not ask.
"No, let it go. I've been hoping I'd make a hit some time and then maybe I'd—no, don't talk about it any more. Listen! who's that coming upstairs? That's Woods, I know his step. Happy fellow! Hear his whistle—he must have got another order for a full-length; nothing like powder-puff teas for encouraging American art, my boy," and a smile crept over Mac's face, which broadened into a laugh when he added, "I'm beginning to think that a course in cooking is as necessary for a painter as a course in perspective."
The expected arrival was by this time beating a rat-a-tat-too on the Chinese screen, his whistle more shrill than ever.
"Come in, you pampered child of fashion!" cried Mac, the sound of Woods's joyous step having completely changed the current of his thoughts. "Stop that racket, I tell you. We know you've got another portrait, but don't split our ears over it."
A black slouch hat rose slowly above the edge of the screen, then a lock of hair, and then a round fat face in a broad grin. It was Boggs!