“Ever so much better,” was the quick retort. “It was positively the most human thing I ever saw you do. You are always so self-contained and precise that you put a quick-tempered mortal like me to shame.”
“Did you ever do anything as senseless as this?”
“Haven’t I? Come into the house and I’ll show you.”
He followed her obediently and stood in the dark hall while she lighted the lamp in her studio. When he joined her she was running over a stack of canvases standing in a corner.
“Do you see that?” she asked, slipping out one of the oil studies and giving it to him.
It was a sketchy little painting of Long’s Peak, and it was punctured with numberless penknife stabs.
“I did that one day when I was particularly savage,” she confessed; “just as you were when you smashed the gate. You don’t know how much good it does me to find out now and then that I haven’t a monopoly of all the bad temper in the world.”
Antrim grinned. “Don’t lose any sleep on that score; you have lots of good company. I have been having a tough time of it all day, and the gate business was only the wind-up.”
“Poor old martyr! And I have been sticking pins into it all evening! What has been the trouble? Or is it tellable?”
“Everything and nothing. It has just been an off day with me all around. I have quarrelled with everybody I could get at, and with myself more than all. I need a balance-wheel worse than anything, Isabel, and it’s for you to say whether I shall have it or not.”