He looked up at her with no token of welcome, but rather as though he withdrew himself unwillingly from his picture.
"Well?" he said, motioning with his head at the wide prospect before them. "What d'you think of it?"
"Oh, a lot," replied Margaret, refusing to commit herself with adjectives. "Can I see?"
He sat back to give her room to look. She had in her time spent sincere days at one of the art schools which help Kensington to its character and was prepared to appreciate expertly. It was a sketch in oils, done mostly with the thumb and palette-knife, a croûte of the most obvious—paint piled in ridges as though the artist would have built his subject in relief upon the canvas, perspective improvised by the light of nature, crudities, brutalities of color, obtruded in the effort for breadth. They were all there. She stared into this mist of blemishes in an effort to see what the painter saw and could not set down, and had to give it up.
In the art school it had been the custom to tell one's fellows the curt, unwelcome truth.
"You can't paint," said Margaret.
"Oh, I know that," answered Ford. "You weren't looking for that, were you?"
"For what, then?" asked Margaret.
He hitched himself up to the canvas again, and began to smudge with his thumb at a mess of yellow ocre.
"There 's something in it that I can see," he said. "I 've been watching this—this desert for more than a year, you know, and I try to get in what I see in it. You can't see anything?"