“How did you know?” she said, with a note of irrepressible irony in her voice. “It is clever of you to have lighted on the truth at once; and I tried so hard to conceal it. Yes, it is a gate—the gate of your own wilderness.”
He looked at her helplessly.
“Is not this sort of thing—this—this wash-painting, in its infancy, as—as it were?”
“Oh, yes! Mine, you would say, tries to run before it can walk.”
“No, no, no,” he murmured.
It was a shock to her to discover his inability to read the soul behind the—possible immature—performance.
“Turn over,” she said. “Perhaps you will like the others better.”
He obeyed, with a vague air of wonderment. The remainder pages were filled with copies, very elegant and painstaking.
“Ah!” he said, with a real relief and an air of embarrassed conciliation. “These are beautiful. You paint in two styles, it seems. How clever you are. I like this the better. I know nothing about such things, of course, and can only judge when I understand a picture and when I don’t. And they are all your own work? You are a genius, upon my soul.”
She did not gainsay him. Perhaps she would not in any case. But now she was indifferent to his praise or silence. Her hero, she thought—a little crossly, it must be confessed—was not all transcendental. What man was? The most amorous appealing eyes, in their moments of apparent inspiration, were usually, if the truth should be confessed, an index of thoughts dreamily loitering through visions of flint-locks, steeple-chases, and even vulgar tankards of small-beer. Now-a-days, whatever savour of romance clung about the creatures, was from their persistent contact, through every phase of evolution, with the finer feminine clay. Yet, could a soul completely gross and commonplace find its expression in a personality so melancholy and so noble? She glanced at her companion with a reviving tenderness. Of earth he might be; but she thrilled to remember the strength of his arms as he bore her from the sinking well-mouth. After all, Apollo was a sportsman before he was a poet; or it never would have occurred to him to skin critics who derided his lays.