“And is not that enough?” said Lenorme.
“No,” answered Malcolm. “And yet it may be too much,” he added, “if you are going to hang it up where people will see it.”
As he said this, he looked hard at the painter for a moment. The dark hue of Lenorme’s cheek deepened; his brows lowered a little farther over the black wells of his eyes; and he painted on without answer.
“By Jove!” he said at length.
“Don’t swear, Mr Lenorme,” said Malcolm. “—Besides, that’s my Lord Liftore’s oath.—If you do, you will teach my lady to swear.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Lenorme, with offence plain enough in his tone.
Thereupon Malcolm told him how on one occasion, himself being present, the marquis her father happening to utter an imprecation, Lady Florimel took the first possible opportunity of using the very same words on her own account, much to the marquis’s amusement and Malcolm’s astonishment. But upon reflection he had come to see that she only wanted to cure her father of the bad habit.
The painter laughed heartily, but stopped all at once and said, “It’s enough to make any fellow swear though, to hear a—groom talk as you do about art.”
“Have I the impudence? I didn’t know it,” said Malcolm, with some dismay. “I seemed to myself merely saying the obvious thing, the common sense, about the picture, on the ground of your own statement of your meaning in it. I am annoyed with myself if I have been talking of things I know nothing about.”
“On the contrary, MacPhail, you are so entirely right in what you say, that I cannot for the life of me understand where or how you can have got it.”