“Not very much,” he answered, with a long, soft look at her. “I have only one way to judge them.”
“And what way is that?”
“If they are portraits, I mean.”
“Yes?”
“I judge them by their humanity. One does not want to be made worse than one is in a picture.”
“I’m afraid you won’t like Dick Garstin’s work,” she said decisively.
She was rather disappointed. Had this audaciously handsome man a cult for the pretty-pretty?
“Let us see!” he replied, smiling.
He looked round the big studio. As he did so she noticed that he had an extraordinarily quick and all-seeing glance, and realized that in some way, in some direction, he must be clever, even exceptionally clever. There were some eight to ten portraits in the studio, a few finished, others half finished or only just begun. Arabian went first to stand before the finished portrait of a girl of about eighteen, whose face was already plainly marked—blurred, not sharpened—by vice. Her youth seemed obscured by a faint fog of vice—as if she had projected it, and was slightly withdrawn behind it. Arabian looked at her in silence. Miss Van Tuyn watched him, standing back, not quite level with him. And she saw on his face an expression that suggested to her a man contemplating something he was very much at home with.
“That is a bad girl!” was his only comment, as he moved on to the next picture.