While his brushes flicked at, and streaked across, the canvas she stood idly watching him.

He was in paint-smeared, baggy trousers and a soft shirt whose open collar gave a glimpse of a deep chest matted with hair and whose rolled-up sleeves revealed forearms that seemed absurdly large to be fiddling with those slender sticks.

A crowbar would have seemed more in harmony.

He was unromantically old--all of thirty-five Maggie guessed; and with his square, rough-hewn face and tousled, reddish hair he was decidedly ugly.

But for the fact that he really did work--though of course his work was foolish--and the fact that he paid his way--he bought little, but no one could beat him by so much as a penny in a bargain, not even the Duchess--Maggie might have considered him as one of the many bums who floated purposelessly through that drab region.
Also, had there not been so many queer people coming and going in this neighborhood--Eads Howe, the hobo millionaire, settlement workers, people who had grown rich and old in their business and preferred to live near it--Maggie might have regarded Hunt with more curiosity, and even with suspicion; but down here one accepted queer people as a matter of course, the only fear being that secretly they might be police or government agents, which Maggie and the others knew very well Hunt was not.