Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/202

194 and permitted her to turn away from him when she talked.

Peter walked about the room and sat down; got up and looked at Nick's things; watched her at moments in silence (which made her always say in a minute that he was not to look at her so or she could do nothing); observed how her position, before her high stand, her lifted arms, her turns of the head, considering her work this way and that, all helped her to be pretty. She repeated again and again that it was an immense pity about Nick, till he was obliged to say he didn't care a straw for Nick: he was perfectly content with the company he found. This was not the sort of thing he thought it right, under the circumstances, to say; but then even the circumstances did not require him to pretend he liked her less than he did. After all she was his cousin; she would cease to be so if she should become his wife; but one advantage of her not entering into that relation was precisely that she would remain his cousin. It was very pleasant to find a young, bright, slim, rose-coloured kinswoman all ready to recognize consanguinity when one came back from cousinless foreign lands. Peter talked about family matters; he didn't know, in his exile, where no one took an interest in them, what a fund of latent curiosity about them was in him. It was in him to gossip about them and to enjoy the sense that he and Biddy had indefeasible properties in common—ever so many things as to which they would understand each other à demimot. He smoked a cigarette, because she begged him to, said that people always smoked in studios—it made her feel so much more like an artist. She apologized for the badness of