He could not long keep silent. "Has somebody been slandering me to my friend?" asked he abruptly, one day, after they had both been silently at work for nearly an hour.
She paused, glanced at him, shook her head—a very charming head it was now, with the hair free about her temples and ears and in a loose coil low upon her neck. "No," said she, apparently with candor. "Why?"
"It seemed to me you were peculiar of late—distant with me."
"Really, it isn't so. You know I'd not permit anyone to speak against you to me."
"But—well, a man of my sort always has a lot of stories going round about him—things not usually regarded as discreditable—but you might not take so lenient a view."
Her face turned toward her easel again, her expression unreadably reserved.
"Not that I've been a saint," he went on. "We who have the artistic temperament— What does that temperament mean but abnormal sensibility of nerves, all the nerves?"
"That is true," assented she.
Then she was not so cold as she seemed! She understood what it was to feel. "Of course," he proceeded, "I appreciate your ideas on those subjects. At least I assume you have the ideas of the people among whom you were brought up."
She was silent for a moment. Then she said, as if she were carefully choosing her words, "I've learned that standards of morals, like standards of taste, are individual. There are many things about human nature as I see it in—in my friends—that I do not understand. But I realize I deserve no credit for being what I am when I have not the slightest temptation to be otherwise."