“Entirely so.”
“Very well.”
Immediately upon this Everett took his place at the easel and began a first rapid sketch of Anna’s head. He was a slight fellow, below the medium height, with a delicate, almost transparent face, a red Vandyke beard, and large and brilliant brown eyes. Quick and nervous in speech and gesture, he had the clear-cut precision of a man who knows both his means and his end.
Anna thought him very interesting.
At the second sitting their talk chanced to turn upon the relation of the ideals of men and women to their practical lives, and Everett told Anna the old story of Carcassonne, which was new to her. The train of thought thus suggested soon absorbed her, so that she forgot him and what he was doing. The sacred hope of her own life, yet unfulfilled, still centring in the hope of her father, the ever receding purpose of which she never spoke, cast its powerful influence upon her.
For half an hour neither spoke. Then Everett’s friend, Professor Ward, came into the room in familiar fashion, and the two men talked of many things.
When Anna left Nathan Ward said, looking over his friend’s shoulder:—
“If you can keep that look, you will make a great picture.” Then he added, “But don’t fail to get her hands. They have the same expression.”
After that it became an habitual thing for Ward to drop into the studio at these sittings. It never occurred to Anna that her presence had anything to do with his coming. She supposed he had always come. He talked very little with her, but she liked to listen to his talk with Everett. It was distinctly novel to her—light, rambling, touch-and-go, and yet full of underlying thought and suggestion. Anna had known few men at best, none of the order to which these two belonged, men conversant with art and literature, music and poetry, and modern life on all its sides. Much that they said puzzled and perplexed her, but she found an eager enjoyment in it.
Then one day Professor Ward said to her, apropos of Shelley, of whom they had been speaking:—