The walls were hung with clever brutalities of the usual kind. Piers glanced from them to Miss Bonnicastle, speculating curiously about her. He had no active dislike for this young woman, and felt a certain respect for her talent, but he thought, as before, how impossible it would be ever to regard her as anything but an abnormality. She was not ill-looking, but seemed to have no single characteristic of her sex which appealed to him.
"What do you think of that?" she asked abruptly, handing him an illustrated paper which had lain open on her lap.
The page she indicated was covered with some half-dozen small drawings, exhibiting scenes from a popular cafe in Paris, done with a good deal of vigour, and some skill in the seizing of facial types.
"Your work?" he asked.
"Mine?" she cried scoffingly. "I could no more do that than swim the channel. Look at the name, can't you?"
He found it in a corner.
"Kite? Our friend?"
"That's the man. He's been looking up since he went to Paris. Some things of his in a French paper had a lot of praise; nude figures—queer symbolical stuff, they say, but uncommonly well done. I haven't seen them; in London they'd be called indecent, the man said who was telling me about them. Of course that's rot. He'll be here in a few days, Olga says."
"She hears from him?"
"It was a surprise letter; he addressed it to this shop, and I sent it on—that's only pot-boiling, of course." She snatched back the paper. "But it's good in its way—don't you think?"