“What do you think of that, Jack?” she said, leaning back with her head critically aslant. “Don't you think that is going to make a famous picture?”
Jack jumped up promptly, leaving his book open on the hearthrug, and came up to her side. He was not a connoisseur, in spite of his associations with art, so he said nothing, but grinned appreciatively, rubbing the calf of one leg with the instep of the other.
“Well,” asked Clytie, “why don't you admire?”
“You aint given them no faces,” said Jack.
“Ah! This is to be one face,” she said, pointing to a kind of remarque at the foot of the sheet. “Or something like it. Now just use your imagination, Jack. This face is to go there—the woman whose whole nature has been awakened, and is shining out of her eyes, and quivering on her lips, and is vibrating all through her frame—all of which is Greek and Chaldee to you, my good Jack; but I may as well explain. And now I have got to fix a face for this one. What kind of face do you think I am going to give her?”
“I dunno,” murmured Jack. And then after a slight pause: “And what's the man going to be like?”
“Ah!” said Clytie with a mock sigh. “What a little Philistine you are! The man can be any kind of creature on two legs. What does it matter about the man? He is a nuisance. I have a good mind to make him awfully ugly with a face like a rhinoceros. See, like this.”
She made a few rapid strokes with her charcoal in the oval left for the man's face, and the result was a picturesque monster with a long nose, Mephistophelian eyebrows, and a moustache curling up to his ears. Then they both burst out laughing.
“Let me draw some funny men for you,” she said in the light-hearted buoyancy of her mood. “Run and get me that sheet of paper over there.”
She pinned the sheet that Jack brought her on to the board and began to draw caricatures.