"You can't make an artist of me at six in the morning," he growled.
In sudden inspiration, Miss Marston threw open the upper half of the door and admitted a straight pathway of warm sun that led across the water just rippling at their feet. The hills behind the steep shore were dark with a mysterious green and fresh with a heavy dew, and from the nooks in the woods around them thrush was answering thrush. Miss Marston gave a sigh of content. The warm, strong sunlight strengthened her and filled her wan cheeks, as the sudden interest in the artist's life seemed to have awakened once more the vigor of her feelings. She clasped her thin hands and accepted both blessings. Clayton also revived. At first he leant listlessly against the door-post, but as minute by minute he drank in the air and the beauty and the hope, his weary frame dilated with incoming sensations. "God, what beauty!" he murmured, and he accepted unquestioningly the interference in his life brought by this woman just as he accepted the gift of sunshine and desire.
"Come to work," said Miss Marston, at last.
"That's no go," he replied, "that subject we selected."
"I dare say you won't do much with it, but it will do as well as any other for experiment and practice."
"I see that you want those arms preserved."
The little woman shrank into her shell for a moment: her lazy artist could scatter insults as negligently as epigrams. Then she blazed out.
"Mr. Clayton, I didn't come here to be insulted."
Clayton, utterly surprised, opened his sleepy eyes in real alarm.
"Bless you, my dear Miss Marston, I can't insult anybody. I never mean anything."