"Hasn't Nick had it out to show you?"
"He says it's in too bad a state—it isn't finished—it won't do."
"And haven't you had the curiosity to turn it round for yourself?"
The embarrassed look in her face deepened under his insistence and it seemed to him that her eyes pleaded with him a moment almost to tears. "I've had an idea he wouldn't like it."
Her visitor's own desire, however, had become too sharp for easy forbearance. He laid his hand on two or three canvases which proved, as he extricated them, to be either blank or covered with rudimentary forms. "Dear Biddy, have you such intense delicacy?" he asked, pulling out something else.
The inquiry was meant in familiar kindness, for Peter was struck even to admiration with her having a sense of honour that all girls haven't. She must in this particular case have longed for a sight of Nick's work—the work that had brought about such a crisis in his life. But she had passed hours in his studio alone without permitting herself a stolen peep; she was capable of that if she believed it would please him. Peter liked a charming girl's being capable of that—he had known charming girls who wouldn't in the least have been—and his question was really a form of homage. Biddy, however, apparently discovered some light mockery in it, and she broke out incongruously:
"I haven't wanted so much to see it! I don't care for her so much as that!"
"So much as what?" He couldn't but wonder.
"I don't care for his actress—for that vulgar creature. I don't like her!" said Biddy almost startlingly.
Peter stared. "I thought you hadn't seen her."