“I saw the missing toe,” asserted the handsome young Irishman, “when I set her for the class. But I wasn’t going to spoil the study. One can easily imagine a toe. He’s got no sense of poetry.”
“I saw a scratch on her wrist,” volunteered the middle-aged man. “I wonder he didn’t want us to paint that.”
“I suppose he’ll put a background to it, and send it to the Academy,” cackled the red-headed young man.
“They’ve got blue noses in Nova Scotia, I believe. I wonder if he put them into his portraits?” the weedy giant remarked in a loud whisper to the little man with the mane.
Though the last two remarks were so impersonal, Matt knew well enough they were aimed at him, and he seemed to feel an undercurrent of resentment against himself beneath the animadversions on Tarmigan, whom he knew the studio revered. He sat uneasily on his stool, poring mechanically over his unhappy study from the nude, and morbidly misreading animosity into this good-humored badinage. Before his mother’s living death he might have replied violently with word or even fist, but life had broken him in. Seeing the new man spiritless, another student took up the parable:
“He’s going to leave it to the nation.”
“Then he’ll have to leave it on the door-step when nobody’s looking,” replied the weedy giant.
Then the stream of wit ran dry, and comparative silence fell upon the room.
Abruptly the voice of the curly-headed wag shot across the silence: “Four-toes, R.A.”
The cry was taken up in a great shout of laughter, even the uninterested joining in from sheer joy in a catchword. It seemed to Matt he had not a friend in the room. But he mistook. The grizzled old shoemaker sidled up to him.