“No, 'e won't. See 'ow 'is foot's braced against the iron? 'E's all right.”
Dick watched Maisie's face and swelled with joy—fine, rank, vulgar triumph. She was more interested in the little crowd than in the picture.
That was something that she could understand.
“And I wanted it so! Oh, I did want it so!” she said at last, under her breath.
“Me,—all me!” said Dick, placidly. “Look at their faces. It hits 'em. They don't know what makes their eyes and mouths open; but I know. And I know my work's right.”
“Yes. I see. Oh, what a thing to have come to one!”
“Come to one, indeed! I had to go out and look for it. What do you think?”
“I call it success. Tell me how you got it.”
They returned to the Park, and Dick delivered himself of the saga of his own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a woman.
From the beginning he told the tale, the I—I—I's flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. Maisie listened and nodded her head. The histories of strife and privation did not move her a hair's-breadth. At the end of each canto he would conclude, “And that gave me some notion of handling colour,” or light, or whatever it might be that he had set out to pursue and understand. He led her breathless across half the world, speaking as he had never spoken in his life before.