Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/21

 oughly Indicative and not half as Subjunctive as her talk, was a reflex from the way his cheek went. If only the mirror were further to the right, so he could see how it really did go—

Rhoda had all but dropped an irreplaceable cup at the question, and here was Miss Pearn waiting for an answer: almost any would satisfy her. Oh, to be able to reply, Plumber!

He gave her the self-deprecatory smile that was his chief social accomplishment, though he was not yet aware of it. The smile redeemed a certain sententiousness that had formed this year as a crust over his style. "One of the more futile vocations, no doubt," he said. "For instance, teaching."

It was an admission he was always a little ashamed of, even though people quite often replied, "Oh to be sure, you're the son of the Professor Thanet." Yet not even to Rhoda, and not even to his mother, just barely to himself had he affirmed that indeed he was not going to sink into an academic bog, of all possible bogs! Furtively, on odd bits of paper, and on the margins of notebooks that ought to have been devoted to learned jottings, he had been drawing pictures that had given him a little thrill up his spine. He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't been drawing pictures. What did that mean? And what did it mean that he had never read the biography of a genius without recognizing moods of his own upon every page? Benvenuto Cellini, Rousseau, even, God