“What! You prefer that?” he said savagely. She faced his look and nodded.
“Any one can do the other; but this, this shocks you—it’s so savage and yet so convincing!”
He came to her side and viewed the canvases, trying to see them with her eyes, to feel a glimmer of her enthusiasm. So pathetic was the effort she saw writ on his clouded face that she longed, in a rush of maternal pity, to take him in her arms and cry.
“But it is good; it is!”
At the end, he said curtly:
“You don’t know—if, indeed, you really meant it.”
“But, Mr. Dan, I do; I do,” she said, seizing his arm. “You’ve done something unusual—something different from the way others do.”
“My dear child,” he said impatiently, “they are both hopeless. One is a pretty fake, and the other is as hard as rocks! Don’t argue; I know.”
He lifted the canvases and set them down with a crash against the wall, while she watched him, with a sinking heart, go and stand by the window in a brooding revulsion. The test had come which she had striven for, prayed for, waited for, and it had failed. She had a moment of intense, hopeless despair.
That night, matters were even worse. Dangerfield relapsed into his wildest mood, as though he, too, had felt the finality of the test and knew that nothing was left to hope for. He managed to slip away without her noticing it, and when he staggered back, late in the night, he was in such a frenzy of remorse, depression, and weakness that she did not dare to leave his side an instant.