He began to tremble a little. He’d never shown them to any one save Krylenko, who only wanted pictures for propaganda and liked everything, good and bad. And now some one who lived in a great world such as he could scarcely imagine, thought they were good. Suddenly all the worries, the troubles, slipping from him, left him shy and childlike.
“I don’t know whether they’re good or bad,” he said, “only ... only I’ve got to do them.”
She was standing before the painting of the Flats seen from the window, over which he had struggled for days. She smiled again, looking at him. “It’s a bit messy ... but it’s got something in it of truth. I’ve seen it like that. It was like that one moonlight night not so long ago. I was walking in the garden ... late ... after midnight. I noticed it.”
She sat down in one of the chairs by the stove. “May I stay and talk a moment?”
“Of course.”
“Sit down too,” she said.
Then he remembered that he was still without a coat, and, seizing it quickly, he put it on and sat down. His mind was all on fire, like a pile of tinder caught by a spark. He had never seen anything like this woman before. She wasn’t what a woman who had led such a life should have been. She wasn’t hard, or vulgar, or coarse, as he had been taught to believe. She must have been nearly forty years old, and yet she was fresh as the morning. And in her beauty, her voice, her manner, there was an odd quality of excitement which changed the very surface of everything about her. Her very presence seemed to make possible anything in the world.
She was saying, “What do you mean to do about it?”
“About what?”
She made a gesture to include the drawings. “All this.”