Then she broke down a little.
“Tea,” she asked. “You like it weak, don’t you?”
Philip settled himself in the chair she had indicated. He, too, like Madge, was inclined to temporise, though his reasons for so doing were different, for his inevitable errand was unpleasant, and the present so extremely the reverse. Her temporisation on the other hand, was that of postponing the inevitable for the sake of the impossible.
“Well, it is good anyhow to see you again,” he said. “Yes, business chiefly has stood in my way. But I won’t be dishonest; I spent nearly two hours this afternoon over the portrait.”
“What portrait?” asked Madge, with a swiftness that she could not help. But she would gladly have recalled it. For the present, however, it appeared that Philip did not notice her vehemence.
“Mine,” he said quietly. “I am sitting to Evelyn, you know. He hopes to have it finished by the twenty-eighth. You shall see it then, but not till then.”
“Yes, keep it for then,” she said, again bracing herself to keep up some sort of attitude which should be natural in a girl to a man she was shortly going to marry. “It must come as a surprise to me, Philip. But only tell me: it is good, isn’t it? I shan’t be disappointed?”
Now, this portrait of himself seemed to Philip more magical work than even that of Madge. He knew himself pretty well, but this afternoon, when he was allowed to see it, he felt that Evelyn somehow must have been inside him to have done that. Brilliant as Madge’s portrait was (the artist himself indeed considering it quite his high-water mark), it was yet but a mood of Madge that he had caught so correctly and delineated so unerringly—that mood of reassuring laughter at the worries and the sorrows of life. But in his own portrait he felt that he himself was there.
“No, I promise you that you will not be disappointed,” he said, “though I daresay it will make you jump. It isn’t on the canvas at all, it seems to me; it is stepping right out of it. And there is there,” he added, “not only this poor business man, but the man who loves you. He has put that in. My goodness, how could he have known what that was like?”
Madge gave a sudden little start, but recovered herself immediately. She could not meet this seriously; it had to be laughed off.