"The temptation was so great."
"We should resist temptation. And you should have asked my leave."
"I was afraid you would refuse it; and you stood there, just in my line of vision."
"You should have asked me to get out of it."
"I should have been very sorry. Besides, it would have been extremely rude."
The young girl looked at him a moment.
"Yes, I think it would. But what you have done is ruder."
"It is a hard case!" said Longueville. "What could I have done, then, decently?"
"It 's a beautiful drawing," murmured the elder lady, handing the thing back to Longueville. Her daughter, meanwhile, had not even glanced at it.
"You might have waited till I should go away," this argumentative young person continued.
Longueville shook his head.
"I never lose opportunities!"
"You might have sketched me afterwards, from memory."
Longueville looked at her, smiling.
"Judge how much better my memory will be now!"
She also smiled a little, but instantly became serious.
"For myself, it 's an episode I shall try to forget.
I don't like the part I have played in it."
"May you never play a less becoming one!" cried Longueville. "I hope that your mother, at least, will accept a memento of the occasion."
And he turned again with his sketch to her companion, who had been listening to the girl's conversation with this enterprising stranger, and looking from one to the other with an air of earnest confusion.
"Won't you do me the honor of keeping my sketch?" he said. "I think it really looks like your daughter."
"Oh, thank you, thank you; I hardly dare," murmured the lady, with a deprecating gesture.
"It will serve as a kind of amends for the liberty I have taken,"
Longueville added; and he began to remove the drawing from its paper block.
"It makes it worse for you to give it to us," said the young girl.
"Oh, my dear, I am sure it 's lovely!" exclaimed her mother.
"It 's wonderfully like you."
"I think that also makes it worse!"
Longueville was at last nettled. The young lady's perversity was perhaps not exactly malignant; but it was certainly ungracious.
She seemed to desire to present herself as a beautiful tormentress.
"How does it make it worse?" he asked, with a frown.
He believed she was clever, and she was certainly ready.
Now, however, she reflected a moment before answering.
"That you should give us your sketch," she said at last.
"It was to your mother I offered it," Longueville observed.
But this observation, the fruit of his irritation, appeared to have no effect upon the young girl.
"Is n't it what painters call a study?" she went on.
"A study is of use to the painter himself. Your justification would be that you should keep your sketch, and that it might be of use to you."
"My daughter is a study, sir, you will say," said the elder lady in a little, light, conciliating voice, and graciously accepting the drawing again.
"I will admit," said Longueville, "that I am very inconsistent.
Set it down to my esteem, madam," he added, looking at the mother.
"That 's for you, mamma," said his model, disengaging her arm from her mother's hand and turning away.
The mamma stood looking at the sketch with a smile which seemed to express a tender desire to reconcile all accidents.
"It 's extremely beautiful," she murmured, "and if you insist on my taking it--"
"I shall regard it as a great honor."
"Very well, then; with many thanks, I will keep it." She looked at the young man a moment, while her daughter walked away.
Longueville thought her a delightful little person; she struck him as a sort of transfigured Quakeress--a mystic with a practical side. "I am sure you think she 's a strange girl," she said.
"She is extremely pretty."
"She is very clever," said the mother.
"She is wonderfully graceful."
"Ah, but she 's good!" cried the old lady.
"I am sure she comes honestly by that," said Longueville, expressively, while his companion, returning his salutation with a certain scrupulous grace of her own, hurried after her daughter.
Longueville remained there staring at the view but not especially seeing it.
He felt as if he had at once enjoyed and lost an opportunity.
After a while he tried to make a sketch of the old beggar-woman who sat there in a sort of palsied immobility, like a rickety statue at a church-door. But his attempt to reproduce her features was not gratifying, and he suddenly laid down his brush. She was not pretty enough--she had a bad profile.
