"
"Dick, that's disgraceful!"
"Wait a minute. I said, strictly speaking. Unfortunately, everybody must be
either a man or a woman."
"I'm glad you allow that much."
"In your case I don't. You aren't a woman. But ordinary people, Maisie, must
behave and work as such. That's what makes me so savage." He hurled a pebble
towards the sea as he spoke. "I know that it is outside my business to care
what people say; I can see that it spoils my output if I listen to 'em; and
yet, confound it all,"--another pebble flew seaward,--"I can't help purring
when I'm rubbed the right way. Even when I can see on a man's forehead that he
is lying his way through a clump of pretty speeches, those lies make me happy
and play the mischief with my hand."
"And when he doesn't say pretty things?"
"Then, belovedest,"--Dick grinned,--"I forget that I am the steward of these
gifts, and I want to make that man love and appreciate my work with a thick
stick. It's too humiliating altogether; but I suppose even if one were an angel
and painted humans altogether from outside, one would lose in touch what one
gained in grip."
Maisie laughed at the idea of Dick as an angel.
"But you seem to think," she said, "that everything nice spoils your hand.
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