"I see you're something of a realist?"
"Don't! Please don't! That word gets on my nerves. I suppose my amiable cousin, Miss Leigh, told you we were all blue-stockings, and dilettantes. I assure you we've got beyond the Realism versus Romance stage of disputation. Really, you don't know how you disappointed me with that question. Mr. Wooton told me you were original!"
Dick flushed a little. "He also told me," he retorted, "that you were extraordinary. I begin to believe him." His tone had a suspicion of pique in it. But Mrs. Stewart beamed.
"Ah," she said, "I like you when you look like that. That's—h'm, now what is that?—anger, I suppose? It's really so long since I had a real emotion that I don't know how it's done. Do you know, I think you and I are going to be great friends! Yes, I feel I'm going to like you immensely. Won't you try to like me?" She leaned over toward him, and his shy young eyes caught the faint flutter of lace on her breast with something of dim bewilderment. Her lips were parted, and her teeth shone like twin rows of pearls. She went on, before he had time to do more than begin a stammer of embarassment, "Yes, just as long as you stay real, and genuine, I want you to come and see me very often; as often as you possibly can. I imagine that talking to you is going to be like dipping in the fountain of youth. Tell me, you people out there in the country, how do you keep so young?"
"Ask me that, Mrs. Stewart, when I have found out how it is that you in town lose your youth so soon."
"True. You will be the better judge. But you never told me how it strikes the artist in you, this town of ours."
"I haven't had time to think yet how it strikes me. I'm busy finding out all about it. Just at present it's all like the genius that came from the fisherman's vessel in the Arabian Nights: it is a huge coil of smoke that stifles me with its might and its thickness. I know there are wonderful color-effects all about me, but my nerves are still so eager for the mere taste of it all that I can't digest anything. Besides—" he stopped and sighed a little—"I must not begin to think of paint for years. I'm a mere apprentice. I just scratch and rub, and scratch and rub, as a brother artist puts it."
"But one sees some very pretty effects in black-and-white. Look at Life, for instance—"
"No, Mrs. Stewart, if you would be loyal to me, don't look at the aforesaid 'loathsome contemporary,' as they say out West." It was Wooton who had approached, and interrupted Mrs. Stewart with an easy nonchalance that, in almost any other man, would have been an unpardonable rudeness. He threw himself on a chair and continued: "Mrs. Stewart, you have wounded me sorely. I bring you a disciple and what do you do? You buttonhole him, as it were, and preach treason to him. For, you must confess, that to tell people to look at Life when they might be looking at—h'm—another periodical, whose name I reverence too highly to mention before a traitoress, is High Treason."
For reply, Mrs. Stewart tapped Wooton lightly on the lips with a large ivory paper-cutter that she had been toying with. "As I was saying, when rudely interrupted, look at—"