“What is it, m’amie? You were not really hurt by my tone? Why I never thought your interest in the question was any but a mildly controversial one. I would not have laughed at you for one moment, Fifine, if I had believed you serious.”
“Yes,” she said, trying resolutely to blink back the drops that would yet collect and fall; “and I wasn’t serious, of course. I don’t know; but perhaps—perhaps this confinement is beginning to tell on me a little; and the long sitting was trying.”
“It is the last,” I answered. “Come and look, Fifine, and speak your mind about it.”
She needed no coaxing; she was the remotest from your weeping woman, obstinate and self-pitying. I took her hand, and she came at once, and stood with me before the picture.
She did not speak for a long time; but at length she turned to me, and I was content in the guerdon of her look.
“Felix,” she said softly, “women are really of coarser fibre than men. You see us not as we are, but as your transcendent imaginations paint us. And we know that well enough; and that is why we will always submit to the judgment of men, rather than to that of our own sex, who know the truth.”
“You are pleased, Fifine?”
“That you can see this in me? I should not be a woman otherwise.”
“But, with the style—the technique?”
“It is all beautiful; only—only you have not yet painted what I can understand.”