"Nonsense—not at all. I'll tell her good-bye for you."
"And the picture?"
"Well, that we may consider finished, I think." Her eyes were resting on the wall behind him. He turned and saw the portrait fastened upon it.
"So she is not even to have—" he began.
"Now, Truesdale," interrupted his aunt, "the picture is not Bertie's, but mine. I thought you understood that."
She followed him to the door. "You won't stay a few minutes longer?" she inquired, with an emollient intention. He shook his head.
"I won't say, Truesdale," she proceeded, with her hand on the knob, "how disappointed I am. Everything, of course, is at a stand-still now. Whether things ever go on again will depend upon you yourself. I am sure that any—any expression of regret, any promise of—of—"
"Ouf!" said Truesdale, as he descended the steps, undecided whether to laugh or to curse. "'When I was a student at Cadiz,'" he found himself humming, half-unconsciously. "H'm! one thing learned in the study of this peculiar civilization: general badness jollied up, specific badness frowned down. What other discoveries await me, I wonder?"
Before he had taken a dozen steps a brougham drawn by a pair of blacks in glittering, gold-plated harness drew up suddenly at the curbstone, in obedience to directions given through the half-open door. In a second the door opened wide, and Gladys McKenna beckoned to him. "Get in," she uttered, in a half-repressed cry.
She had divined the situation in two swift glances. She had witnessed the moody exit of Truesdale, and she had had a glimpse of the anxious little face of Bertie Patterson in the bay-window above. Her desire to live life, to dramatize it as promptly and effectively as possible, had led her to the instant appropriation of the banned and rejected Truesdale—thus it was that she figured him.