“Clytie!” cried Winifred reproachfully.
Clytie laughed; and Kent with her. The light jest brought them nearer together.
“No; I do that when I feel wicked,” said Clytie. “I paint a nice, correct little picture for the nice, correct people who are going to buy it, and then I grow angry with them and feel I should like to shock them, take the stiffening out of them, reduce them to elemental bits of humanity. Look at this group of street urchins. I am doing that on order for my dealer. Here is Jack—look at him now staring into the stove with the unreasoning content of a young dog. Doesn't he seem nice and conventional in the picture? You can hear the young lady of the house saying to the curate, 'Aren't these little street children too delightful?' Now if they were shown the real Jack, it would give them to think, as the French say—and they hate doing that. This is my idea of the real Jack.”
She whisked the cloth off the easel and showed Kent the charcoal ébauche of her own particular study of the urchin.
She had worked rapidly that day, with the feverishness that Kent deprecated. Whether she would convert the sketch into a finished picture she did not know. She had desired to fix the haunting impression of Jack's possible history.
Kent was somewhat startled by the suddenness of the presentation. There was the boy, refined, delicate in feature, great-eyed, curly-haired, but repulsive with cruelty and animalism; in a degraded attitude, head bent forward, knees bent, lips parted in a sneer.
“He does not look like that now,” said Kent, comparing the original with the copy.
“Wait,” said Clytie. Then imperiously to the urchin: “Jack, what are you thinking of?”
He turned, looked up at her shiftingly.
“Dunno.”