"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed: "Shabby things!"
She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other things.
"Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect."
"No. I shall come to see you."
But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:
"I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well, pour away! Has the magazine project failed?"
"On the contrary, it has been a succès fou. But I don't feel altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print much more rubbish than I supposed."
"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their nostrils."
She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she stepped back rhythmically, tilting her pretty head this way and that, he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her mouth and shut it to say, "Well?"
"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the first quality."