He lingered a little, flicking his legs with his whip.
“You might as well congratulate me, if only for the sake of politeness,” he said in an injured tone.
“Oh, yes; I congratulate you,” she replied.
Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. She felt an almost irresistible impulse to burst forth into a torrent of speech, to say out finally all the bitterness and loathing that were in her heart. She restrained herself, but the effort gave a queer guttural resonance to her words. She turned and looked out of the window.
“What the devil's the matter?” he asked impatiently. “I came in, 'pon my soul, thinking you'd be pleased. It's a safe seat. I'm dead certain to knock the confounded Radical into a cocked hat. Just the moment when I've got what I've been sweating for the last eighteen months, confound it all, I did think you'd be civil for once in a way. But it's just like you; I might have expected it. Well, perhaps it's the truth to say you don't care a damn one way or the other.”
He walked to and fro for a little, fuming. Then his eyes falling on the photograph that lay on the table, he picked it up, as an angry man will do, looked at it absently for a moment, and pitched it sharply to the other side of the room. Clytie, startled by the slight click of the cardboard striking against the wall, turned half round and met his eyes fixed loweringly upon her. Each held the other spellbound for a few seconds. Then the door opened and Jack came into the studio, checking his motion forward as he saw Thornton.
“What the deuce is this?” cried the latter.
With a swift, instinctive glance Clytie compared the two faces. They were astonishingly alike. The same finely moulded features, dark lucent eyes, brown crisp hair, white evenly set teeth; the same lines of cruelty at the corners of the lips. Strange that, much as she had studied Jack's physiognomy, the likeness had never suggested itself. At Thornton's petulant question the boy looked at him half frightened, and then at Clytie, and was about to shrink back. But she called him in.
“Don't go away without your drawing, Jack. This,” she said coldly to Thornton, “is a protégé of mine. He was once my model—for my picture 'Jack.' Here, Jack, take your drawing. Run home. Thank you for coming to see me.”
“And—and the photograph. You said you'd give it me back.”