‘What is he, you pitiless wretch?’
‘Fairest Hebe, fill our Prometheus Vinctus another glass of Burgundy, and find your guitar, to silence him.’
‘It was the ocean nymphs who came to comfort Prometheus—and unsandalled, too, if I recollect right,’ said Lancelot, smiling at Sabina. ‘Come, now, if he will not tell me, perhaps you will?’
Sabina only blushed, and laughed mysteriously.
‘You surely are intimate with him, Claude? When and where did you meet him first?’
‘Seventeen years ago, on the barricades of the three days, in the charming little pandemonium called Paris, he picked me out of a gutter, a boy of fifteen, with a musket-ball through my body; mended me, and sent me to a painter’s studio. . . . The next séjour I had with him began in sight of the Demawend. Sabina, perhaps you might like to relate to Mr. Smith that interview, and the circumstances under which you made your first sketch of that magnificent and little-known volcano?’
Sabina blushed again—this time scarlet; and, to Lancelot’s astonishment, pulled off her slipper, and brandishing it daintily, uttered some unintelligible threat, in an Oriental language, at the laughing Claude.
‘Why, you must have been in the East?’
‘Why not! Do you think that figure and that walk were picked up in stay-ridden, toe-pinching England? . . . Ay, in the East; and why not elsewhere? Do you think I got my knowledge of the human figure from the live-model in the Royal Academy?’
‘I certainly have always had my doubts of it. You are the only man I know who can paint muscle in motion.’