“I must go and take off my hat,” she said, quite humbly, and ran upstairs.
Indeed, she had given fate every chance of depriving her of this pleasure. Fate was against her—or for her! She conscientiously rubbed her hair flat with a wet brush, disposed her spectacles squarely over her eyes and walked demurely downstairs to join Mr. Rivers.
“Yes, it is fate!” she said to herself again, as she sat down opposite him. The slatternly maid removed the dull pewter cover from three sad and starved looking chops and the shapeless ghosts of three potatoes, and then shuffled out of the room like an escaped convict. It was not luxury, but it was Paradise.
Still, in order to lead up to a question she wished to ask him about the black-browed girl who had waited on her a day or two before, Mrs. Elles remarked, carelessly, “I don’t think much of the service at this inn; do you?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I think I warned you not to expect much, did I not? But it is clean, at any rate, and that’s all I care for.”
“Oh, yes, it is quite charming. But still that clumsy servant must be rather a trial to you?”
“I am not fidgety,” he said. “And I have taught her not to touch my painting things. That is the main point, for me. I had to be very strict about that, for she completely ruined a drawing of mine, once.”
“How?” asked Mrs. Elles, interested.
“Oh, with the enquiring thumb of her class. It lighted on the sky, unfortunately. She was dreadfully sorry about it, and actually brought me five shillings and asked me if that would cover the damage? You know it takes an expert to handle a drawing as the painter of it would like to see it handled. I am quite beside myself sometimes, when I have to stand by and see intending purchasers take hold of them, and run their thumbs into the corners, and make creases in the paper! But one can say nothing, of course.”
She looked at the artist’s own hands, and noticed the way he took hold of things. His long, thin, eminently prehensile fingers had a way of deliberately grasping an object in exactly the place where the eye had previously decreed that it should be grasped, without false shots or clumsy bungling of any kind. It was a hand skilled in all mechanical exercises, and apt at all delicate manœuvres. It was firm and strong, too—the hand of an artist and a craftsman.