She then returned to the subject that was distressing her. “Are you sure you don’t regret the drawing—are not cross with me about it? Isn’t it in that portfolio—what remains of it? Show it me.”
“Oh, no, no!” he said, shuddering.
But she had reached out for the portfolio that lay near her hand, and, with the wilfulness of illness, insisted on taking out the hopelessly blurred, grey-streaked sheet of paper stretched on a board. There was a hole in the paper, the size of a shilling, just where the sky-line met the cliff. It was utterly ruined, as the merest tyro in art must have realised.
“Oh, poor, poor thing! A snag has caught it, too, like my leg,” she moaned.
Rivers dabbled furiously away in the glass of water with his fat brush. He was an artist and human.
“I wish you would take it away!” he said, sulkily, without looking at it or her.
“Where to?” asked Mrs. Elles, almost weeping.
“Oh, anywhere—to the devil, if you like.”
“I’ll put it in my room, then,” she said, calmly. “I shall like to have it as a memento.”
She slyly dropped it behind the sofa until she could carry it upstairs, and he did not seem even to notice what she was doing.