“While we are waiting for Ah Foo I'll show you some of Jack's sketches,” he went on, finding a portfolio and opening it upon the drawing-board.
“Are you quite sure Mr. Winton won't mind?” she asked.
“Mind? He'd give a month's pay to be here to show them himself. He is peacock vain of his one small accomplishment, Winton is—bores me to death with it sometimes.”
“Really?” was the mocking rejoinder, and they began to look at the sketches.
They were heads, most of them, impressionistic studies in pencil or pastel, with now and then a pen-and-ink bearing evidence of more painstaking after-work. They were made on bits of map paper, the backs of old letters, and not a few on leaves torn from an engineer's note-book.
“They don't count for much in an artistic way,” said Adams, with the brutal frankness of a friendly critic, “but they will serve to show you that I wasn't all kinds of an embroiderer when I was telling you about Winton's proclivities the other day.”
“I shouldn't apologize for that, if I were you,” she retorted. “It is well past apology, don't you think?” And then: “What is this one?”
They had come to the last of the sketches, which was a rude map. It was penciled on the leaf of a memorandum, and Adams recognized it as the outline Winton had made and used in explaining the right-of-way entanglement.
“It is a map,” he said; “one that Jack drew day before yesterday when he was trying to make me understand the situation up here. I wonder why he kept it? Is there anything on the other side?”
She turned the leaf, and they both went speechless for the moment. The reverse of the scrap of cross-ruled paper held a very fair likeness of a face which Virginia's mirror had oftenest portrayed: a sketch setting forth in a few vigorous strokes of the pencil the impressionist's ideal of the “goddess fresh from the bath.”