“What d’you mean?”
“I mean that Arabian is the sort of man who can frighten women. Now if you don’t talk of something else I shall leave you here alone. Another word on that subject and I go!”
“Tell me, Beryl. What do you really think of Wyndham Lewis? You know his portrait of Ezra Pound?”
“Of course I do.”
“Don’t you think it’s a masterpiece?”
“Do you? I can never get at your real ideas about modern painting.”
“And I thought I wore them all down in my own pictures.”
“You certainly don’t sit on the fence when you paint.”
And then they talked pictures. Perhaps Garstin at that moment for once laid himself out to be charming. He could fascinate Miss Van Tuyn’s mind when he chose. She respected his brain. It could lure her. As a worker she secretly almost loved Garstin, and she believed that the world would remember him when he was gone to the shadows and the dust.
Two champagne bottles had been emptied when they got up to go. The little room was deserted and had a look of being settled in for the night. Raoul took his tip and yawned behind his big yellow hand. As Miss Van Tuyn was about to leave the restaurant he bent down to the floor and picked up a paper which had fallen against the wall near her seat.