Mrs. Severn said nothing for a minute or two, but went on working at her easel with her back to him; and when one is eager and excited to start with, there is nothing more exasperating than to have one’s warm and one-sided statement received thus with chilling silence. It is the surest way to fill up what is wanting of the cup of indignation. ‘You say nothing,’ Laurie continued, with impatience, ‘and yet, of course, you must have suffered from it yourself.’
‘You will think I am helping to bar the door of my trade,’ said the padrona, ‘and I know I deserve that you should fly through the window or through the ceiling in wrath; but I can’t help it. He was quite right. You have all your amateur habits to break yourself of, and to get to work like,--like,--one of us. Don’t be vexed. I have wanted to say it before, and, of course, with the generosity of my kind, I say it now when you are down.’
‘You too!’ Laurie said with a pang. He took two or three turns up and down the painting-room before he could speak. And but for pride, which would not permit him to show how deep was his mortification, I fear he would have blazed and exploded out of the house; but as soon as he had come to himself, pride, more potent than any better feeling, cleared the cloud from his brow.
‘I thought you had a better opinion of me,’ he said, reproachfully, standing behind the easel and casting pathetic glances at her. ‘I came to you to be,--consoled, I suppose,--like an ass. I thought I was already something of a painter,--at least to you,--or why should I be encouraged to attempt anything? Why didn’t you say to me, “Go and be a shoemaker?”--as, indeed, Welby was honest enough to do.’
‘Now, Laurie, don’t be unjust,’ said the padrona. ‘Don’t you see it is because I expect you to do something worth while that I want you to study hard and learn everything? What is a year’s work to you at your age? When one gets old one would give everything for the chance of such a preparation. What am I but an amateur myself, not half instructed as I ought to be? And that is why I am so anxious that it should be different with you,--at your age.’
‘I cannot see what my age has to do with it,’ said Laurie, ‘nor why you should always want to set me down as a boy;’ and then he paused and compunction overtook him. He went up to his adviser, in the coaxing way which Laurie had been master of all his life. He could not take her hand, for she had her brush in it and was working all the time; but he took the wide sleeve of her painting-dress between his fingers and caressed it, which came to much the same thing. ‘You are so good to me,’ he said,--‘always so kind and so good. I never thought you would be against me too.’