“How that man hates me!” said the girl. “And how he loves you, Maisie!”
“What nonsense? I knew Dick’s very fond of me, but he had his work to do, and I have mine.”
“Yes, he is fond of you, and I think he knows there is something in impressionism, after all. Maisie, can’t you see?”
“See? See what?”
“Nothing; only, I know that if I could get any man to look at me as that man looks at you, I’d—I don’t know what I’d do. But he hates me. Oh, how he hates me!”
She was not altogether correct. Dick’s hatred was tempered with gratitude for a few moments, and then he forgot the girl entirely. Only the sense of shame remained, and he was nursing it across the Park in the fog. “There’ll be an explosion one of these days,” he said wrathfully. “But it isn’t Maisie’s fault; she’s right, quite right, as far as she knows, and I can’t blame her. This business has been going on for three months nearly.
Three months!—and it cost me ten years’ knocking about to get at the notion, the merest raw notion, of my work. That’s true; but then I didn’t have pins, drawing-pins, and palette-knives, stuck into me every Sunday.
Oh, my little darling, if ever I break you, somebody will have a very bad time of it. No, she won’t. I’d be as big a fool about her as I am now. I’ll poison that red-haired girl on my wedding-day,—she’s unwholesome,—and now I’ll pass on these present bad times to Torp.”
Torpenhow had been moved to lecture Dick more than once lately on the sin of levity, and Dick had listened and replied not a word. In the weeks between the first few Sundays of his discipline he had flung himself savagely into his work, resolved that Maisie should at least know the full stretch of his powers. Then he had taught Maisie that she must not pay the least attention to any work outside her own, and Maisie had obeyed him all too well. She took his counsels, but was not interested in his pictures.
“Your things smell of tobacco and blood,” she said once. “Can’t you do anything except soldiers?”