rebellious.
“Sure. It’s quite challenging, once you get into one.”
The Englishman was not totally reassured. He hovered apologetically, and confided this anecdote: “Picasso, you know, had a woman come to him for advice about learning to draw, and he told her right off,
‘Dessinez antiques.’
Draw from the antique. There’s nothing like it, for getting the big forms.”
Then Seabright left, pattering past threatening athletes and emperors, through the archway, out of the section altogether, into the brighter room where medieval armor, spurs, rings, spoons, and chalices were displayed. The sound of his shoes died. From behind the hedge of pedestals, quite close to Leonard’s ear, Robin’s clear voice piped, “Well, isn’t Puss in a snorty mood?”
To attack the statue Seabright assigned him, Leonard moved his horse several yards forward, without abandoning the precious light that filtered through a window high behind him. From this new position Robin was in part visible. A plinth still concealed her bulk, but around the plinth’s cornerher propped drawing board showed, and her hand when it stabbed at the paper, and even her whole head, massive with floppy fair hair, when she bent forward into a detail. He was at first too shy to risk meeting her eyes, so her foot, cut off at the ankle and thus isolated in its blue ballet slipper on the shadowy marble floor, received the brunt of his attention. It was a long foot, with the division of the toes just beginning at the rim of the slipper’s blue arc, and the smooth pallor of the exposed oval yielding, above the instep, to the mist-reddened roughness of an Englishwoman’s leg. These national legs, thick at the ankles and glazed up to the knees with a kind of weatherproofing, on Robin were not homely; like a piece of fine pink ceramic her ankle kept taking, in Seabright’s phrase, his eye.
After an hour Leonard brought out, “Aren’t your feet cold, in just those slippers?”
“Rather,” she promptly responded and, with the quick skip that proved to be her custom, went beyond the question: “Gives me the shivers all over, being in this rotten place.”
It was too quick for him. “You mean the school?”
“Oh, the school’s all right; it’s these wretched antiques.”
“Don’t you like them? Don’t you find them sort of stable, and timeless?”
“If these old things are timeless, I’d rather be timely by a long shot.”
“No, seriously. Think of them as angels.”
“Seriously my foot. You Americans are never serious. Everything you say’s a variety of joke; honestly, it’s like conversing in a monkey-house.”
On this severe note Leonard feared they had concluded; but a minute later she showed him his silence was too careful by lucidly announcing, “I have a friend who’s an atheist andhopes World War Three blows everything to bits. He doesn’t care. He’s an atheist.”
Their subsequent conversations sustained this discouraging quality, of two creatures thrown together in the same language exchanging, across a distance wider than it seemed, miscalculated signals. He felt she quite misjudged his seriousness and would have been astonished to learn how deeply and solidly she had been placed in his heart, affording a fulcrum by which he lifted the great dead mass of his spare time, which now seemed almost lighter than air, a haze of quixotic expectations, imagined murmurs, easy undressings, and tourist delights. He believed he was coming to love England. He went to a tailor and bought for four guineas a typical jacket of stiff green wool, only to discover, before the smeary mirror in his digs, that it made his head look absurdly small, like one berry on top of a bush; and he kept wearing his little zippered khaki windbreaker to the Constable School.
As an alien, he could not estimate how silly she truly was. She was eighteen, and described looking up as a child and seeing bombs floatingly fall from the belly of a German bomber, yet
“Sure. It’s quite challenging, once you get into one.”
The Englishman was not totally reassured. He hovered apologetically, and confided this anecdote: “Picasso, you know, had a woman come to him for advice about learning to draw, and he told her right off,
‘Dessinez antiques.’
Draw from the antique. There’s nothing like it, for getting the big forms.”
Then Seabright left, pattering past threatening athletes and emperors, through the archway, out of the section altogether, into the brighter room where medieval armor, spurs, rings, spoons, and chalices were displayed. The sound of his shoes died. From behind the hedge of pedestals, quite close to Leonard’s ear, Robin’s clear voice piped, “Well, isn’t Puss in a snorty mood?”
To attack the statue Seabright assigned him, Leonard moved his horse several yards forward, without abandoning the precious light that filtered through a window high behind him. From this new position Robin was in part visible. A plinth still concealed her bulk, but around the plinth’s cornerher propped drawing board showed, and her hand when it stabbed at the paper, and even her whole head, massive with floppy fair hair, when she bent forward into a detail. He was at first too shy to risk meeting her eyes, so her foot, cut off at the ankle and thus isolated in its blue ballet slipper on the shadowy marble floor, received the brunt of his attention. It was a long foot, with the division of the toes just beginning at the rim of the slipper’s blue arc, and the smooth pallor of the exposed oval yielding, above the instep, to the mist-reddened roughness of an Englishwoman’s leg. These national legs, thick at the ankles and glazed up to the knees with a kind of weatherproofing, on Robin were not homely; like a piece of fine pink ceramic her ankle kept taking, in Seabright’s phrase, his eye.
After an hour Leonard brought out, “Aren’t your feet cold, in just those slippers?”
“Rather,” she promptly responded and, with the quick skip that proved to be her custom, went beyond the question: “Gives me the shivers all over, being in this rotten place.”
It was too quick for him. “You mean the school?”
“Oh, the school’s all right; it’s these wretched antiques.”
“Don’t you like them? Don’t you find them sort of stable, and timeless?”
“If these old things are timeless, I’d rather be timely by a long shot.”
“No, seriously. Think of them as angels.”
“Seriously my foot. You Americans are never serious. Everything you say’s a variety of joke; honestly, it’s like conversing in a monkey-house.”
On this severe note Leonard feared they had concluded; but a minute later she showed him his silence was too careful by lucidly announcing, “I have a friend who’s an atheist andhopes World War Three blows everything to bits. He doesn’t care. He’s an atheist.”
Their subsequent conversations sustained this discouraging quality, of two creatures thrown together in the same language exchanging, across a distance wider than it seemed, miscalculated signals. He felt she quite misjudged his seriousness and would have been astonished to learn how deeply and solidly she had been placed in his heart, affording a fulcrum by which he lifted the great dead mass of his spare time, which now seemed almost lighter than air, a haze of quixotic expectations, imagined murmurs, easy undressings, and tourist delights. He believed he was coming to love England. He went to a tailor and bought for four guineas a typical jacket of stiff green wool, only to discover, before the smeary mirror in his digs, that it made his head look absurdly small, like one berry on top of a bush; and he kept wearing his little zippered khaki windbreaker to the Constable School.
As an alien, he could not estimate how silly she truly was. She was eighteen, and described looking up as a child and seeing bombs floatingly fall from the belly of a German bomber, yet
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