better way? Are you looking for one of our young ladies?”
Francine began to feel a certain reluctant interest in him when he spoke of “our young ladies.” She asked if he belonged to the school.
The corners of his mouth turned up again. “I’m one of the masters,” he said. “Are you going to belong to the school, too?”
Francine bent her head, with a gravity and condescension intended to keep him at his proper distance. Far from being discouraged, he permitted his curiosity to take additional liberties. “Are you to have the misfortune of being one of my pupils?” he asked.
“I don’t know who you are.”
“You won’t be much wiser when you do know. My name is Alban Morris.”
Francine corrected herself. “I mean, I don’t know what you teach.”
Alban Morris pointed to the fragments of his sketch from Nature. “I am a bad artist,” he said. “Some bad artists become Royal Academicians. Some take to drink. Some get a pension. And some—I am one of them—find refuge in schools. Drawing is an ‘Extra’ at this school. Will you take my advice? Spare your good father’s pocket; say you don’t want to learn to draw.”
He was so gravely in earnest that Francine burst out laughing. “You are a strange man,” she said.
“Wrong again, miss. I am only an unhappy man.”
The furrows in his face deepened, the latent humor died out of his eyes. He turned to the summer-house window, and took up a pipe and tobacco pouch, left on the ledge.
“I lost my only friend last year,” he said. “Since the death of my dog, my pipe is the one companion I have left. Naturally I am not allowed to enjoy the honest fellow’s society in the presence of ladies. They have their own taste in perfumes. Their clothes and their letters reek with the foetid secretion of the musk deer. The clean vegetable smell of tobacco is unendurable to them. Allow me to retire—and let me thank you for the trouble you took to save my drawing.”
The tone of indifference in which he expressed his gratitude
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