Paul Pangbutt shrugged his shoulders:
“A part of the price you must pay for being a beautiful woman, my dear lady,” he said—and he went back to his painting.
“What? Spite!” she asked, the handsome brows meeting in questioning furrows. Her lips were very red—half open with delicious whisperings of scarlet sin, a minor poet had it—so she would keep them half open, though she most pronouncedly estranged herself from the minor poet for close upon a fortnight in display of her deep resentment. Thus, too, she was now being limned.
Pangbutt painted the corner of her pathetic mouth:
“Spite is the unwitting tribute of a petty mind,” he pronounced.
“I don’t see that that is any excuse for it,” she said smartly.
Pangbutt stood back; and he uttered a light laugh:
“The world is one vast engine of criticism,” he said. “A man is not a critic because he writes for a newspaper. That act is generally the mark of his incapacity. We are all discriminators. Bless my soul—conversation is criticism more than half the time! And why not?”
“That’s rather alarming, isn’t it?” she cooed. “Fancy if we criticised our friends!”
“Exactly what you do!” he pshawed. “You give your friendship: it is criticism in action. On others you turn a cold shoulder. You have said no word—but you have passed criticism. You have—well!—you have turned a very pretty but cruel back—uttered a more brutal verdict than tongue ever spoke.”