'She can learn anything, if she will.'

'IF she will! Egad, that's it. But if she won't?'

Crack!--on Mr. Jasper's part.

'How's she looking, Jack?'

Mr. Jasper's concentrated face again includes the portrait as he
returns: 'Very like your sketch indeed.'

'I AM a little proud of it,' says the young fellow, glancing up at
the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking
a corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in
the air: 'Not badly hit off from memory. But I ought to have
caught that expression pretty well, for I have seen it often
enough.'

Crack!--on Edwin Drood's part.

Crack!--on Mr. Jasper's part.

'In point of fact,' the former resumes, after some silent dipping
among his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, 'I see it
whenever I go to see Pussy. If I don't find it on her face, I
leave it there.--You know I do, Miss Scornful Pert. Booh!' With a
twirl of the nut-crackers at the portrait.

Crack! crack! crack. Slowly, on Mr. Jasper's part.