“Now that may be Kent—oh, it is Kent, of course—but it’s not Madala’s attitude to Kent. She was not in the least afraid of him.”
“Ah, but that later passage, the country passage—that’s pure Madala.”
“Yes. Just where it ceases to be Kent—‘He stoops, I suppose. He’s worn out with work. He’s quite ordinary.’ That’s not Kent.”
“No, that’s true. One doesn’t know where to have her. She muddles her trail,” said Mr. Flood.
“I call it weakness of touch not to let you know whom she drew from,” said the Baxter girl.
“Ah, but she always insisted that she didn’t draw portraits.”
“Of course. They always do. If one believed them one would never get behind the scenes, and if one can’t get behind the scenes one might as well be mere public and read for the story,” said the Baxter girl indignantly.
“Well, you know,” Miss Howe sat turning over the pages of The Resting-place with careful, almost with caressing fingers, “I don’t believe she meant to draw portraits. She had queer, old-fashioned notions. I think she would have thought it—treacherous.”
“The portraits are there though, if you look close enough,” insisted the Baxter girl.
“Yes, but they happened in spite of her. Anyone she was fond of she took into her, in a sense: and when her gift descended upon her and demanded expression, then, all unconsciously, she expressed them too. But gilded! We find ourselves in her books, and we never knew before how lovable we are. You’re right, Blanche, she liked whate’er she looked on. And you’re right too, Jasper, Grande amoureuse, she was that. That capacity for loving made her what she was. The technical facility was her talent and her luck; but it was her own personality that turned it into genius.”