“I don’t know a thing about painting, so nothing I could say about your way of doing it could matter one way or the other. But I have eyes to see the way things and people look. Tell me, now, honest Injun, do they look that way to you–the way you paint them?”
He laughed.
“Mrs. Hawthorne, no! Emphatically, no. And emphatically yes. When I look at them as you do, in the street, across the table, they look to me probably just as they do to you; but when I sit down to paint them–yes, they look to me as I have shown them looking in these portraits.”
“But they’re so sad! So sad it’s cruel!” she objected.
“Oh, no,” he objected to her objection; “it’s not quite as bad as that.”
176“They make me perfectly miserable.”
He whipped the canvas off the easel, saying dryly:
“Don’t think of them again!”
It looked like impatience. With hands thrust in his pockets he took a purposeless half-turn in the room, then came back to her side.
“If you totally detest them, I am sorry,” he said mildly. “I had wanted to offer you one, a little, unobtrusive one to stick in some corner, a token of the artist’s regard.”