"Oh, that's it, is it?" And she half believed it true.
On the day following she was distinctly mournful. "Do you mean to tell me that you can ever work over that mass of red and blue and yellow freckles into anything resembling Bertie's complexion?—such a beautiful one, too!" Bertie blushed. "There! look at it now!" cried his aunt, with a mounting enthusiasm; and Bertie blushed still more violently. Truesdale gave her a brief glance, which he at once transferred to his palette. This was the first time in his life that he had ever lowered his eyes from a woman's face, merely because there happened to be a blush upon it.
"Work it over?" he presently inquired, as he looked up to his aunt across his shoulder. "I never work anything over."
"Is it going to stay that way?" demanded his aunt, peremptorily. Bertie's own face was overcast, with an expression of plaintive distrust.
"Of course it is. I work in the primary colors. If you should prefer something a little less advanced…." He waved his maulstick vaguely, as if in reference to the professorial practice of Munich, or to the antediluvian school of England.
"Well, if that's the way it's going to stay…." commented his aunt, with her face close to the canvas.
"My dear aunt," protested Truesdale, "we don't look at a painting with our noses, but with our eyes. I decompose what is before me into the primary colors. Now the thing for you to do is to step back ten or twelve feet and recompose them. That armchair over there is just about your point of view precisely—and so inviting and comfortable! Try it."
His aunt removed herself to the point suggested. "Well, perhaps it does look a little better from here." And Bertie Patterson breathed a tiny sigh of relief; for the last thing in the world she wished to be was a witness to her young artist's failure.
"Of course," responded Truesdale. He gave an invocatory sweep with his brush, and the spirit of complete modernity descended and perched upon the top of his easel. "Just wait; it will be so naïve; it will seem so improvised, so spontaneous—a regular little impromptu. Of course."
But the next day his aunt accompanied him to the front door when he took his leave. Her tone to-day was one of out-and-out protest.