“Why don't you take a policeman?” he blurted out. “If anything should happen to you—It isn't safe,” he concluded lamely.
“Not even when I'm chaperoned with an ammonia popgun?” she smiled. “Why do you carry that?”
“For dogs. Dogs don't always like me. It's my clothes, I suppose.”
“Any dog who wouldn't like and trust you on sight,” she pronounced with intense conviction, “is an imbecile.”
He smiled his acknowledgment. At that her face altered.
“There you go, smiling once more,” she said fretfully. “You do it very seldom, but—”
“I'm always smiling, deep inside me, at you,” he said quietly.
“But when you smile outside, it makes you so different. And I find I've done you all wrong.”
“Are you still sculping me?” he asked in surprise.
“I—I have been, but I stopped.” She paused, trying again to think of him as merely a model, and found, to her discomfiture, that it caused a queer, inexplicable little pang deep inside her heart. Nevertheless, the artist rose overpoweringly within her at his next question.