"It's my business to see things as they are," was the painter's exasperating reply. "And I'd not in any circumstances be blind to such a marvelous study in long lines as she."
"Marvelous!" Mrs. Morris laughed.
"Long face, long neck, long bust, long waist, long legs, long hands and feet," explained he. "It's the kind of beauty that has to be pointed out to ordinary eyes before they see it. I can imagine her passing for homely in a rude community, just as her expression of calm might pass for coldness."
Mrs. Morris revised her opinion of Boris. She had thought him a most tactful person; she knew the truth now. A man who would praise one woman to another could never be called tactful; to praise enthusiastically was worse than tactless, it was boorish. "How impossible it is," thought she, "for a man of low origin to rise wholly above it." She said, "I'm delighted that my cousin pleases you," as coldly as she could speak to a man after whom everyone was running.
"I must paint her," he said, noting Letty's anger, but indifferent to it. "If I succeed, everyone will see what I see. If that woman were to love and be loved, her face would become—divine! Divinely human, I mean—for she's flesh and blood. The fire's there—laid and ready for the match."
When he and Morris were alone after dinner he began on Neva again, unaffected by her seeming incapacity to respond to his efforts to interest her. "I could scarcely talk for watching her," he said. "She puzzles me. I should not have believed a girl—an unmarried woman—could have such an expression."
"She's not a girl," explained Morris. "She has taken her maiden name again. She was Mrs. Armstrong—was married until last summer to the chap that was made president of the O.A.D. last October."
"Never heard of him," said the artist.
"That shows how little you know about what's going on downtown. When Galloway died—you've heard of Galloway?"
"I painted him—an old eagle—or vulture."