“Do you keep your champagne in ice? We never do in the bar. When the gentlemen want it they have a piece to put in their wine.”
“I wish you'd try to forget your gentlemen when you come here.”
Lizzie began to cry, and it was hard to console her; she said that Frank had spoilt her lunch for her.
“It is because you are so much superior to the men I see you speaking to. How can I help feeling annoyed that you should be serving drinks?”
“But I've got to get my living. You don't suppose I serve in a bar because I like it?”
“No, of course not; but don't let us talk any more about it. You're going to sit to me, and I want to do as pretty a portrait of you as I can. All that beautiful brown hair, and that hat! Let me take it from your head!” Frank had bought this hat for her and had handed it to her over the counter, thereby bringing censure upon her from the manager. “Let's forget what I said. The hat suits you. There, now against the light, just a three-quarter face.”
At the end of half an hour he said she was a very good sitter and this pleased her, and she tried to keep the pose till the clock struck, but at the end of fifty minutes she said: “I must get up,” and she came round to see what he was doing.
“Now you mustn't criticise it,” he said. “It's only a beginning. You've forgiven me my remarks about the bar?”
“Don't remind me of it again.”
But he could not get it out of his head that he had annoyed her, and was unable to apply himself to his painting; perhaps for this reason his drawing went wrong, and his colour became muddy, and the thought struck him that if Maggie were to find this portrait about the studio she would certainly ask him whose portrait it was.