"The mere handling, quite apart from anything else——"
There again she had Jennie on the hip. Jennie might love his pictures merely because they were his, but Julia painted, knew the technicalities, would make intimacies, opportunities, flattering occasions out of them——
"There's one, just a few bits of broken white ruins with her lying there—he wasn't going to show me that at first——"
But ah, her eyes had spied it out, and he had had to show it.
"You've seen them, George. Now I ask you, could any boy of eighteen possibly have painted them?"
That too she had the audacity to claim—that he was eighteen when she wanted him to be eighteen and forty-five when she wanted him to be forty-five. Here again Jennie Aird was to be put in the wrong. It was to be an anachronism and monstrous that Jennie should love so widely out of her age.
"Could he, I ask you? Doesn't it show? You were perfectly right when you tried to stop that flirtation between those two, George, and you're absolutely wrong in wanting it to go on now. She's no right whatever, and neither has he. Leave it to me. He called me Miss Oliphant, but it can be Julia in five minutes, and anything else I like in ten——"
I did not choose to remind her again that she was leaving him out of the calculation. I had warned her once, and it comforted me to think that he was not quite so unarmed as she supposed against this sort of spiritual rape.... She went musingly on.
"'Miss Oliphant!' ... But wait a bit. It was myself and Daphne Wade for it before, and then it was all sentimental association and stained-glass and church-music and because he was wrapped in dreams. Sentiment's all very well in its way, George, but give me Get-up-and-get. That's the cock to fight. Daphne euchred me once——"
"Where did you get these expressions?" I asked her calmly.