But she was a good girl in the days that followed and a baffling one to Oliver Seton, who had delightedly foreseen squally weather. He enjoyed quarrelling with a pretty woman. But he soon agreed to agree with a dove-like Laura, and so well that Justin was gratified. For it had seemed to Justin, till she and Oliver between them disturbed him, that Laura was already greatly improved. His idea of a woman, in those dogmatical days, was the ideal of Mr. Edmund Sparkler, and Laura, since the evening in Milan that appeared already far away, was daily more completely fulfilling it. If she had been his favourite armchair, at arm’s length from his bookshelves and the back to the light, she could not have suited him better. And, appreciating her, he was pleased that his friend should appreciate her also, and she his friend. He had been worried by their first inimical encounter. Oliver he knew for a weathercock; but Laura’s opinions, negligible as he felt them to be, had always their effect on him: had, until he accounted for them, a singular and uneasy effect upon him, as of undigested apples. That Laura, with no nonsense about her, had seen fit to withdraw her objections, was a real if unrealized relief. That Laura, chattering nineteen to Oliver’s dozen, with that ardent and enthusiastic young gentleman securely attached to her painting-apron strings, should like him in her own private heart no whit the better, simply could not occur to him.
But then there was so much that did not occur to Justin. There is an incident in the lives of those two friends of his of which he never dreamed; though it took place in the very shadow of his Roman nose; though it rankled a long while, quite three months, in Oliver’s mind and to Laura was a memory that could still make her ears burn when her blushet days had grown as thin and unreal to her as the pressed flowers in her Prayer Book on Sundays.
For Oliver, inevitably, as Justin ought to have known he must, fell in love with Laura. They were always together. There is no doubt that even in winter his emotions were easy, and here was spring herself waking daily in Florence to wantoner life. He could not help feeling poetical when the sun and the bees, and now and then a butterfly, strayed in at the open doors of the galleries and the churches and the monasteries where he and Justin attended to the education of untravelled Laura—Justin olympically, Oliver with a growing conviction that she could, if she chose, have taught them both. She was diffident—Oliver wondered why—but she could be surprised into illuminating criticism, especially when Justin was out of earshot, and Oliver, in this spring mood of his and as impressionable as only the sea or an artist can be, was quickly aware that she was good for him. Justin’s tendency was to classify, to lock doors, to enclose; but she must be ever querying, opening, opening up avenues. She scattered questions like corn while they were garnering their conclusions, and Oliver was amazed to find how constantly those questions took root in him, sprouted into new thoughts, fresh, sturdy, blossom-bearing. In short, she stimulated him: set his fingers itching for his brushes. He always worked better when he had a woman in his head.
He planned a picture of her. He was an impetuous person, and he discovered in her profile and her fine meek lips a resemblance to some perfectly amazing portrait of some absolutely superb woman by that man who knocked every other Florentine into a cocked hat—what’s his name?—Ghirlandaio. He was quite sure it was Ghirlandaio: remembered the picture: remembered its exact position on the left-hand wall of——Lord! didn’t Justin remember? They spent a questing week scouring Florence for the Ghirlandaio before Oliver remembered that it wasn’t a Ghirlandaio at all, but a Botticelli (it was a Botticelli year for Oliver) and that it wasn’t in Florence either, but in London.
“A background, my dear chap! a background—divine! My word, what a blue! Like Shelley’s blue dome! Like Bellini’s doge—the background, not the doge, you chump! Never seen it? My God, and you live an hour from London!”
And then he had raked down Brogi’s for a copy and brought it to them in triumph.
“I told you so! There you are! No, they’d only got a postcard. But if you imagine the colour” (followed the blue doge), “it’s the image. I’ve simply got to paint her. My word, what a blind bat you are!”
But Justin sat and enjoyed him non-committally, as you see a sleepy tom enjoying the permitted onslaughts of a terrier pup.
“Can’t you see it?” Oliver worried at him. He could not be contented by acquiescence. He wanted enthusiasm. “The twin—the absolute twin! It only wants a slight wave in her hair”—(Laura glanced sidelong at Justin) “to be a photograph!”
Justin, goaded into interest, stretched out a hand for the photograph, examined and returned it.