'Do,' she murmured.
'Well, you seem to be a pair against me,' her uncle grumbled. 'Anyhow I think it's important. People have been talking for some time, and I don't want to be taken unawares; I won't be a yoked ox, mind you.'
'Have you been sketching lately?' Dacier asked Miss Asper.
She generally filled a book in the autumn, she said.
'May I see it?'
'If you wish.'
They had a short tussle with her uncle and escaped. He was conducted to a room midway upstairs: an heiress's conception of a saintly little room; and more impresive in purity, indeed it was, than a saint's, with the many crucifixes, gold and silver emblems, velvet prie-Dieu chairs, jewel-clasped sacred volumes: every invitation to meditate in luxury on an ascetic religiousness.
She depreciated her sketching powers. 'I am impatient with my imperfections. I am therefore doomed not to advance.'
'On the contrary, that is the state guaranteeing ultimate excellence,' he said, much disposed to drone about it.
She sighed: 'I fear not.'