“Oh, serious!” cried Mademoiselle Noémie, but with her extraordinary smile.
“I know very little about pictures or how they are painted. If you can’t do all that, of course you can’t. Do what you can, then.”
“It will be very bad,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.
“Oh,” said Newman, laughing, “if you are determined it shall be bad, of course it will. But why do you go on painting badly?”
“I can do nothing else; I have no real talent.”
“You are deceiving your father, then.”
The young girl hesitated a moment. “He knows very well!”
“No,” Newman declared; “I am sure he believes in you.”
“He is afraid of me. I go on painting badly, as you say, because I want to learn. I like it, at any rate. And I like being here; it is a place to come to, every day; it is better than sitting in a little dark, damp room, on a court, or selling buttons and whalebones over a counter.”
“Of course it is much more amusing,” said Newman. “But for a poor girl isn’t it rather an expensive amusement?”