“Not much developing and printing,” Rebecca said. “There’s no money in that, but I do do enlargements occasionally. I do wish I had enough money so I wasn’t always worrying about expense. I could really turn out marvelous work if I had enough money to get myself a little car so I could get out and...”
“She does very fine work,” Mrs. Gentrie explained to Tragg. “I’ve often told her that if she’d specialize in taking pictures of children and...”
“Children!” Rebecca flared. “That’s the mother complex of yours. You want pictures of the little darlings taken on their birthdays, pictures when they first put on long pants, pictures in their new suits. Those sort of pictures clutter up the house and don’t mean a blessed thing.”
“They mean a lot to Arthur and me,” Mrs. Gentrie said.
“Well, they mean nothing to me. They simply are a waste of good photographic material. You find family albums filled up with that sort of junk.” She turned to Lieutenant Tragg and said, “What I want are pictures of unusual cloud effects, of trees against the sky, of flowers. I could win prizes if I just had enough money to get myself a car and didn’t always have to use photographic material which had expired.”
“What do you mean by material that has expired?” Tragg asked.
“Oh, you know, films are only good while they’re fresh. They’ll keep for a certain length of time. You must have noticed that whenever you buy film, there’s an emulsion date on it.”
“You mean the little rubber-stamped date which says develop before a certain date?”
“That’s right,” Rebecca said.
“But you can use it after that date?”