"Why, what's the matter with my head?" I asked irritably as I got gingerly off the movable throne. "And, anyhow, I didn't ask to be modelled. You made me sit here—I didn't want to do it."
"Oh, people make practice for one, whatever they're like."
"Good-bye," I said stiffly.
At the second sitting I tried to make allowances for the artistic temperament when Wilkinson prowled round me with a look of something like horror on his face, assaulted my features with compasses, and turned away gibbering. I even kept calm when informed that one of my eyes was considerably larger and wider open than the other and that I had "no drawing" in my face. "No offence, old chap," added my former friend with a grin. "You must remember it's the artist-eye that's responsible for these cursory reflections."
"I wonder," I remarked musingly, "whether the artist-eye is a feature that occasionally gets blacked by an indignant sitter."
At the third and fourth sittings more bitter so-called truths were handed out to me, and he was down on my "construction" like a hundred of bricks.
"That's a normal one," here he indicated a skull on a shelf; "his bones are all right. But if yours were stripped of the flesh——"
"I shan't be sorry when these sittings are over," I said; then, as I caught a side view of the clay head, "I say! Am I as frightful as that?"
"As frightful as that!" snorted Wilkinson; "why, I've flattered you, if anything. People never know what they're like. There's such a lot of rotten vanity knocking about."
When the last sitting was over my wrongs found voice.