He could not bring himself to wear the red sash. It reminded him of Mitchell, who had been with him when he bought it.
It had been very hot. The walls and the pavements gave out a dry, stifling heat. The smell of the street outside came up in waves--a smell of women and babies, leather and kosher meat. He must wait for the cool weather, he thought, before he asked her to the studio again.
"She is only a little girl," he said to himself. "She is pretty, but she is only a little girl. I will tell her that she must not see Mitchell again, because he is not true. I will paint her portrait, and then I will not see her again, because she is only a little girl."
He sat in the window with the clock in front of him, and directly it said half-past four he clapped his hat on his head, seized the silver-knobbed stick which at that time was an indispensable part of an artist's apparel, and bolted as though he were late for a train.
She was waiting for him. He took off his hat, but in his nervousness he could not speak, and as he could not remember which side of a lady he ought to walk, he bewildered her by dodging from one side to the other with a quick, catlike tread, so that she did not hear him, and whenever she turned to speak to him he was not there.
"Wasn't it a good picnic!" she said enthusiastically. "It's the best picnic I've ever been to."
"They are usually pretty good," he said lamely. "I think we'd better go by bus."
They mounted a bus and sat silently side by side.
When they stopped by the Cobden statue he said:--
"A friend of mine has just taken a studio in Camden Town. His name is Logan."
That settled Logan for her. She began to feel anxious. Was the afternoon going to be a failure? Why could she never, never get the better of her shyness? She wanted to make him happy because, on the whole, people had been beastly to him and said such horrid things about him. She wanted him to feel for himself, and not only through her, that the world was a very wonderful place, a place in which to be happy. He was so stiff and different, so taut and tightly strung up, that lounging, loose-limbed Mitchell seemed graceful compared with him. Yet there was something unforgettable about him, and he had always had for her the vivid romantic reality of the beautiful young men on the stage, who were creatures of a delicious, absurd world which she would never enter and never wished to enter: a world where young men opened their arms and young women sank into them and were provided with happiness for ever and ever. Her vigour rejected this world, for she knew and lived in a better, but all the same it had its charm and its curious reality. . . .