“I think that was it, but my aunt has always refused to talk about them.”
“She hated my father. She blames him for all the troubles that have come into her life.”
“And now she takes that hate out on you?”
The girl did not answer his question. Instead, she placed a smaller canvas for his inspection and said: “Would you care to see the Corot now?”
It was the same story over again, only this time the copy was of a canvas with which he was not familiar; and again he wondered how he was going to be able to tell her. She became conscious of his increasing gravity.
“You don’t like them?” she asked at a venture.
The only thing he liked in all that dusty-aired attic was the slender, stooping figure with its aura of repressed ardencies. But this, he knew, was not the time to say so.
“How do you feel about them?” he countered, watching her as she turned toward him and absently rubbed her fingers together. It struck him at first as a movement of repudiation, but he remembered that it was merely an effort to remove the attic dust from her hands.
“It’s hard to explain,” was her answer. “Some of them I dislike and some of them I can’t understand, and there are a few of them I almost hate.”
“I don’t think I could make it clear to you,” was all she said.
He saw no light through the blind wall of his dilemma, and he could not quite see how the first move was to be made. So he asked, in a merciful effort at postponement: “What pictures were taken from this collection?”
“My father took the ones he liked when he went away the last time. He took them all but one.” She had misunderstood him.
“No; you spoke of your Aunt Georgina carrying some of them downstairs when she fell,” he reminded her. “What were they, besides the Bouguereau?”
She met his glance courageously in the clear light that flooded them.
“One was a copy of Manet’s _Breakfast on the Grass_ and the other was the _Olympe_.”
He began to divine the demands he had made on her courage.
“And that was the reason they were removed?” he asked, smiling in spite of himself.
He found it harder than ever to go on. So he said almost curtly: “Let’s see the Correggio.”
“Now the others,” he commanded, after he had confirmed his suspicions as to the larger canvas with the mendacious medallion on its tarnished frame.