“By Jove! What made you rush along like that?”
“There was no time,” said Matt.
“Time! Why, there’s four more evenings. Every model sits a fortnight—six nights, you know.”
“Well, she’s done, anyhow,” said Matt, in rueful amusement.
“Yes, she is done anyhow.” And his mentor laughed. “Why, that ’ll never do. You can’t show work like that.”
“Why not? It’s like her.”
“Yes, but there’s no finish in it. It’s only a sketch. You’re supposed to make a careful study of it. Tarmigan insists on the exact character of the model. He always says even Velasquez’s early things were tight and careful.”
But Matt felt he could not take the thing any further—at any rate, not that night; the fury of inspiration was over. He sat abstractedly watching the quivering of the model’s tired limbs and her shadows on the screen, a dusky silhouette with lighter penumbras, till the hour was up.
On Matt’s homeward journey he was overtaken by old Gregson, who discovered that their routes coincided, and renewed his admiration of Matt’s foot and his request to gauge its beauties, till at last, unwilling to disoblige a brother artist, but feeling rather ridiculous, the young man slipped off his boot in the shelter of a doorway, under the light of a street-lamp, and the wrinkled old man, producing a tape-measure, ecstatically recorded, on a crumpled envelope, the varied perfections of its form.
At the next lesson Matt set to work and painted away all the force of his study in the effort to reach the standard prevailing at Grainger’s. But he worked dispirited and joyless, like a war-horse between the shafts of an omnibus, or a savage in a stiff shirt and a frock-coat; suppressing himself with the same sense of drear duty as when he had sawn logs or drilled potatoes. During the “rest,” while Matt was listening in amazement to some secret information concerning royal personages, who seemed to have confided all their intrigues to Bubbles, William Gregson drew him mysteriously into the anteroom.