She was caught without difficulty. “The gifted Checkerberry hasn’t been round lately,” she smiled. “He won’t expose himself to the night air for some time. He’s got laryngitis so he can’t talk above a whisper.” Her eye twinkled and she laughed, though what she communicated was not on the face of it very funny.
He was perhaps calling attention to this when he said, “Poor devil!”
“Yes,” she agreed, achieving sobriety, “it’s bad weather for laryngitis,” and went on with the weather, dropping Italo. “It’s been a mean sort of day, hasn’t it? I haven’t set foot outside. I was already feeling kind of blue and making up my mind to go to bed when Gaetano came with your present.”
There was an intimation in her glance that this event had not made the world appear any rosier.
Both turned to look at the picture. Their hands loosened naturally; they sat apart.
“Can’t you see why I had to paint it, Mrs. Hawthorne?” he asked, speaking eagerly, and as if pressing his defense.
“How could I endure to have that thing down-stairs stand as my idea, my sole idea, of you? And how could I bear to make you a gift, a sole gift, of a piece of work I do not respect? This may be worth no more,–I think differently,–but it is at least the best I can produce. It has my sanction. You, too, believe me, will prefer it to the other after a while.”
She shook her head a little disconsolately.
“The other you can, if you must, keep in your drawing-room 233to make an agreeable spot of color,” he went on, reversing their parts and trying to induce in her a lighter humor; “it has that perfectly legitimate use. In your drawing-room, you know, Auroretta, among the pictures of your choosing, it does not, in our Italian idiom, altogether disappear. This one you will keep out of sight, but will look at now and then, if you please; and I quite trust you, with time, to recognize that it was painted by some one who understood and honored you more than there was any evidence of his doing when he perpetrated, for a joke, that bonbon-box subject down-stairs.”
Mrs. Hawthorne, with soft and saddened eyes fixed on the portrait, again shook her head, sighing, “Poor thing!”