"It will never be finished," he replied. "I shall keep it by me and work at it from time to time." He stood off and looked at it lovingly. "You're mine, there," he went on. "All mine, young woman." And he took one of her long brushes and scrawled "Boris" across the lower left corner of the canvas. "It shall be my bid for immortality for us both. When you've ceased to belong to yourself or anyone, when you shall have passed away and are lost forever in the abyss of forgotten centuries, Boris's Neva will still be Boris's. And men and women of races we never dreamed of will stand before her and say, 'She—oh, I forget her name, but she's the woman Boris loved.'"
A note in his mock-serious tone, a gleam in his smiling gaze made the tears well into her eyes; and he saw them, and the omen put him in a glow. In his own light tone, she corrected, "A woman Boris fancied."
"The woman Boris loved," he repeated. "The woman he was never separated from, the woman he never let out of his sight. There are two of you, now. And I have the immortal one. What do you think of it?"
"There's nothing left for the mortal one but to get and to stay out of sight. No one that once saw your Neva would take much interest in mine."
"It's a portrait that's a likeness," said he. "With you, the outside happens to be an adequate reflection of the inside." And he smiled at her simplicity, which he knew was as unaffected as it always is with those who think little about themselves, much about their surroundings.
"I wish I could see it," she said wistfully.
"You can see it in the face of any man who happens to be looking at you."
But she had turned to her portrait of Narcisse and was eying it disdainfully. "I must hide that," she went on, "as long as yours is in this room. How clumsy my work looks—how painstaking and 'talented.'" She wheeled it behind a curtain.
"None of that! None of that!" he protested severely. "Never depreciate your own work to yourself. You can't be like me, nor I like you. Each flower its own perfume, each bird its own song. You are a painter born; so am I. No one can be more."
"I know, I know," she apologized. "I'm not as foolishly self-effacing as when you first took me in hand, am I?"