He was rather angry. “I wish you could be serious. You never seem to consider me a real painter.”
“I will if you will only paint a real picture. But you are so abominably lazy that I don’t believe you ever will.”
He was not offended, for such is our fallen nature that most men accept this reproach from a woman as implying a compliment; besides she was affording him the opening he had been waiting for. “You wrong me,” he said. “I may not do all I might, but then I have no one to inspire me, to urge me on, to care what work I produce.”
“No,” she agreed sympathetically.! “And it’s too bad to expect you to do anything till you find somebody who will do all that for you — isn’t it?”
“You turn everything into ridicule,” he said impatiently, “and yet I could show you a picture if I chose, tha
