“What did you gather when I put him through his paces just now?” he asked, sending out clouds of strong-smelling smoke.
“Oh, I don’t know! Not very much. He seems to have been about, to have plenty of money.”
“And no education. He doesn’t know a thing about pictures, painters. Just at first I thought he might have been a model. Not a bit of it! Books mean nothing to him. What that chap has studied is the pornographic book of life, my girl. He has no imagination. His feeling runs straight in the direction of sensuality. He’s as ignorant and as clever as they’re made. He’s never done a stroke of honest work in his life, and despises all those who are fools enough to toil, me among them. He is as acquisitive as a monkey and a magpie rolled into one. His constitution is made of iron, and I dare say his nerves are made of steel. He’s a rare one, I tell you, and I’ll make a rare picture of him.”
“I don’t know whether you are right, Dick.”
Garstin seemed quite unaffected by her doubt of his power to read character. Perhaps at that moment he was coolly reading hers, and laughing to himself about women. But if so, he did not show it. And she said in a moment:
“You are really going to give him the portrait?”
“Yes, when I’ve exhibited it. Not before, of course. The gentleman isn’t going to have it all his own way.”
Miss Van Tuyn looked rather thoughtful, even preoccupied. Almost immediately afterwards she got up to go.
“Coming to-morrow?” he said.
“What—to see you paint?”