"I have read 'Manon Lescaut,'" said Miss Jones. I found nothing to say.
"You will understand that I cannot sit to-day. You will understand that I never should have sat for you at all had I known," Miss Jones pursued.
I said that I understood.
"I have come to-day to bring you back the money that I have earned under false pretences."
She laid the little packet down upon the table. I turned white. "And to ask you"—here Miss Jones observed me steadily—"whether you do not feel that you owe me apologies."
"Miss Jones," I said, "I have unwittingly, unintentionally, given you great pain; that, with my present knowledge of your exceptional character, I now see to have been inevitable. I humbly beg your pardon for it, but I also beg you to believe that from the first I never thought of you but with respect and admiration."
Miss Jones's face took on quite a terrible look.
"Respect! Admiration! While you were looking from me to that!" She pointed to Manon. "While I was clothing your imagination, personifying to you that vile creature!"
I tried to stop her with an exclamation of shocked denial, but she went on, with fierce dignity:
"Exceptional! You call it exceptional to feel debased by that association? Can I ever look at my face again without thinking: 'The face of Manon Lescaut?' Can I ever forget that we were thought of as one? No"—she held up her hand—"let me speak. Do you suppose I cannot see now the cleverness, yes, the diabolical cleverness, of your picture of me there? The likeness is horrible; and there I shall stand for the world to gaze at as long as the canvas lasts and as long as people look at any pictures. There I shall be, gibbeted in that woman's smile! No, I have not done! There will be no escape possible. Somewhere—I shall always feel it like a hot iron searing me—somewhere that other I will be all my life long, and when I am dead, and for centuries perhaps, she will smile on, and my image will be looked at as a type of vice! I see it now," and with a sort of grandeur of revelation she turned upon Manon, "I see that it is a masterpiece!"