"_Is_ my left eye as indistinct as that?" she asked, playfully. "Can't you see my eyelashes? That is impressionism, I suppose." I felt my forehead growing hot.
"I am afraid shadows are convenient sometimes, aren't they? I like just a plain, straight-forward telling of the truth, with no green paint over it! You accept a little well-meant teasing, don't you?"
I accepted it as I had to accept her various revelations of stupefying obtuseness, and smiled over the sandy mouthful.
"Yes," she pursued, carefully looking up and down the canvas--certainly a new sign of interest in me and my work--"you will need quite two days to finish it; the hands especially, they are rather sketchy about the finger-tips." She might have been a genial old professor giving me advice mingled with the good-humored _raillerie_ of superiority. The hands were finished; but I kept a cowardly silence.
"And the dress must be a good bit more distinctly outlined; I can't see _where_ it goes on this side; and then the details of the background--I can hardly tell what those dashes and splashes on the dressing-table are supposed to represent."
"I think you are standing a little too near the canvas," I said, in a voice which I strove to free from a tone of patient long-suffering. "If you go farther away, you will get the effect of the _ensemble_."
"No, no!" she laughed; she evidently thought that her ethical relationship justified an equally frank æsthetic helpfulness, and her air of competence was bewildering. "No, we must not run away from the truth! A smudge is a smudge from whatever standpoint one looks at it, and a smear a smear."
The masterly treatment of porcelains, ivories, and silver on the dressing-table, glimmering and gleaming from the soft shadows, to be qualified in such terms!
"You are rather severe," I said. My discomfort was apparent, but she naturally took it to be on my own behalf, not, as it was, on hers.
"Oh! you mustn't think _that_! I hope I am never unduly severe. You will easily mend matters to-day and to-morrow and polish over that rather careless look. And, as far as that goes, I am at your service as long as you need me."
"As model _and_ critic," I observed, with a touch of bitterness.