Nan smiled.
"Come in, pessimist, and don't begin by being epigrammatic on the very doorstep. Tea? Or coffee? I'm afraid the flat doesn't run to whisky-and-soda."
"Coffee, please—and your conversation—will suffice. 'A Loaf of
Bread . . . and Thou beside me singing in the Wilderness' . . ."
"You'd much prefer a whisky-and-soda and a grilled steak to the loaf and—the et ceteras," observed Nan cynically. "There's a very wide gulf between what a man says and what he thinks."
"There's a much wider one between what a man wants and what he gets," he returned grimly.
"You'll soon have all you want," she answered. "You're well on the way to fame already."
"Do you know," he remarked irrelevantly, "your eyes are exactly like blue violets. I'd like to paint you, Nan."
"Perhaps I'll sit for you some day," she replied, handing him his coffee.
"That is, if you're very good."
Maryon Rooke was a man the merit of whose work was just beginning to be noticed in the art world. For years he had laboured unacknowledged and with increasing bitterness—for he knew his own worth. But now, though, still only in his early thirties, his reputation, particularly as a painter of women's portraits, had begun to be noised abroad. His feet were on the lower rungs of the ladder, and it was generally prophesied that he would ultimately reach the top. His gifts were undeniable, and there was a certain ruthlessness in the line of the lips above the small Van Dyck beard he wore which suggested that he would permit little to stand in the way of his attaining his goal—be it what it might.
"You'd make a delightful picture, Sun-kissed," he said, narrowing his eyes and using one of his most frequent names for her. "With your blue violet eyes and that rose-petal skin of yours."