“Some of them,” I said. He was looking at the photograph next to it. “I didn’t take that one.”

“I know what this one is,” he said, pointing at it. “It’s a boxer, right?”

“An English bulldog,” I said.

“Oh, right. Weren’t those the ones that were exterminated? For being vicious?”

“No,” I said.

He moved on to the picture over the developer, like a tourist in a museum. “I bet you didn’t take this one either,” he said, pointing at the high shoes, the old-fashioned hat on the stout old woman holding the dogs in her arms.

“That’s a photograph of Beatrix Potter, the English children’s author,” I said. “She wrote Peter Rabbit.”

He wasn’t interested. “What kind of dogs are those?”

“Pekingese.”

“It’s a great picture of them.” It is, in fact, a terrible picture of them. One of them has wrenched his face away from the camera, and the other sits grimly in her owner’s hand, waiting for its chance. Obviously neither of them liked having its picture taken, though you can’t tell that from their expressions. They reveal nothing in their little flat-nosed faces, in their black little eyes.

Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, comes through beautifully, in spite of the attempt to smile for the camera and the fact that she must have had to hold onto the Pekes for dear life, or maybe because of that. The fierce, humorous love she felt for her fierce, humorous little dogs is all there in her face. She must never, in spite of Peter Rabbit and its attendant fame, have developed a public face. Everything she felt was right there, unprotected, unshuttered. Like Katie.