"Inside, I've certainly changed," admitted Neva. "Don't you think we're, all of us, like the animals that shed their skins? We live in a mental skin, and it seems to be ours for good and all; but all the time a new skin is forming underneath; and then, some fine day, the old skin slips away, and we're quite new from top to tip—apparently."
Narcisse's expression was encouraging.
"That happened to me," continued Neva. "But I didn't realize it—not completely—until the divorce was over and I was settled here, in this huge wilderness where the people can't find each other or even see each other, for the crowd. It was the first time in my life. I could look about me with the certainty I wasn't being watched, peeped at, pressed in on all sides by curious eyes—hostile eyes, for all curious eyes are hostile. But you were born and brought up in a small town. You know."
"Yes," said Narcisse. "Everybody lives a public life in a little town."
"Here I could, so to speak, stand in the sun naked and let its light beat on my body, without fear of peepers and pryers." She drew a long breath and stretched out her arms in a gesture of enormous relief. "I dare to be myself. Free! All my life I'd been shut in, waiting and hoping some one would come and lead me out where there was warmth and affection. Wasn't that vanity! Now, I'm seeking what I want—the only way to get it."
Narcisse's face took on an expression of cynicism, melancholy rather than bitter. "Don't seek among your fellow beings. They're always off the right temperature—they either burn you or freeze you."
"Oh, but I'm not trying to get warmth, but to give it," replied Neva. "I'm not merchandising. I'm in a business where the losses are the profits, the givings the gains."
"The only businesses that really pay," said Narcisse. "The returns from the others are like the magician's money that seemed to be gold but was only withered mulberry leaves. Won't you let me see some of your work—anything?"
Neva drew aside a curtain, wheeled out an easel, on it her unfinished portrait of Raphael. At first glance—and with most people the first glance is the final verdict—there seemed only an elusive resemblance to Raphael. It was one of those portraits that are forthwith condemned as "poor likenesses." But Narcisse, perhaps partly because she was sympathetically interested in Neva's work and knew that Neva must put intelligence into whatever she did, soon penetrated to the deeper purpose. The human face is both a medium and a mask; it both reveals and covers the personality behind. It is more the mask and less the medium when the personality is consciously facing the world. A portrait that is a good likeness is, thus, often a meaningless or misleading picture of the personality, because it presents that personality when carefully posed for conscious inspection. On the other hand, a portrait that is hardly recognizable by those who know best, and least, the person it purports to portray, may be in fact a true, a profound, a perfect likeness—a faithful reproduction of the face as a medium, with the mask discarded. The problem the painter attempts, the problem genius occasionally solves but mere talent rarely, and then imperfectly, is to combine the medium and the mask—to paint the mask so transparently that the medium, the real face, shows through; yet not so transparently that eyes which demand a "speaking likeness" are disappointed.
Neva, taught by Raphael to face and wrestle with that problem, was in this secret unfinished portrait striving for his "living likeness" only. She had learned that painting the "speaking likeness" is an unimportant matter to the artist as artist—however important it may be to him as seeker of profitable orders or of fame's brassy acclaim so vulgar yet so sweet. She was not seeking fame, she was not dependent upon commissions; she was free to grapple the ultimate mystery of art. And this attempt to fix Raphael, the beautiful-ugly, lofty-low, fine-coarse, kind-cruel personality that walked the earth behind that gorgeous-grotesque external of his, was her first essay.