He extended the open box to the actress, but she refused it with a slight grimace.
"You make a mistake," he said; "this is some 37, Hardham's; our élégantes prefer it to any other." Then after a brief pause he added, "Your physiognomy is scarcely less changeable than Garrick's; you have laughed, you have wept; you have been gay, excited, mournful. Now, of all these expressions which have chased each other over your charming face—nay, do not blush; I am an old man—of all these varied expressions which is the veritable, the dominant one,—the one which expresses the character of your soul? As long as I fail to discover this expression in the model, so long is my brush paralyzed. I am obliged to seek until I find it. I have painted Garrick both in tragedy and comedy; Admiral Keppel, sword in hand, upon the point of giving the order to clear the decks for action; Kitty Fisher, at her toilet, since it was her profession to be beautiful and to please. I have represented Goldsmith writing the final pages of the 'Vicar' or the sweet verses of the 'Deserted Village'; Sterne, thinking of poor Maria's suffering or of the death of Lieut. Lefèvre. His wig was all awry and the rascal wanted to straighten it. 'Let it be as it is!' I said to him; 'if it is straight, you are no longer the author of 'Tristram Shandy.' When I paint a child I give it some playthings; a young mother, I surround her with her children. Notice this one, for instance—"
"That is my comrade, Mrs. Hartley."
"Exactly. She carries her little daughter upon her back and laughs merrily. Fanciful maternity! There are mythological beauties and modern beauties. The one will be a nymph and gently rest her limbs upon the velvet sward in the genial atmosphere of a Grecian landscape; the other, muffled up to her neck, her muff pressed to her nose, in order to conceal a mouth that is a trifle expansive, elects to promenade the denuded paths of her park and leave the imprint of her tiny, fur-clad feet along the snow. It is the cold, you understand, which lends brilliancy to the eyes and a rosy tip to the ear; it is the cold that gives color and life. Thus I strive to place every human being in his or her favorite attitude, amidst congenial surroundings, beneath the ray which is best calculated to illumine. And I lie in wait for the divine moment when the woman exhales all her seduction, the man all the power of his mind."
He paused for a moment.
"Well, and you!" he continued quickly. "I have not found you yet; I have no hold upon you. I must attempt some subterfuge."
Thereupon he raised his voice.
"Frank!—Frank!"
A masked door, which Esther had not remarked, opened almost immediately and a young man of perhaps two and twenty years of age appeared upon the threshold. Miss Woodville uttered a stifled cry and half rose from her chair.
"My lord!" she breathed almost inaudibly; "how comes it that—you—"