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Show 46 screen and had come out in his bathrobe which she had found there looking so cute, he had thought, so dwarfed and shy. "Just in that chair," he had said. And she had moved to the chair, paused, dropped the bathrobe and sat. "Could you angle slightly," Hunt had said, "to your left? Just a bit." And she had done it. "What about something . . . something to read?" he had asked. "It's really, well, forgive the pun but a pain in the ass, to sit like that for a couple of hours without doing anything. Do you like to read? Do you like poetry? I've got a lot of books of poetry. Or if you've got some letters that you need to write -- I've got something that's sort of like stationary." "Poetry." She had said only the single word. Then, when he'd handed her a Modern British and American anthology, she'd said: "You know, I haven't read poetry since I was in college." And she'd smiled, smiled as openly as he had seen her smile and added: "My husband's a surgeon." "Well, I respect science," Hunt had said and gone back to the last preparations of his canvas. So Hunt, fresh and unpracticed yet in his stupidity with women, had painted and Martha McAllister had read, and they had chatted. "Do you really not do this with people a lot?" Martha had asked. "First time," Hunt had said. "Why?" "What do you mean?" "Why ever did you asj< me?" "You're striking." |
