“You mean that pink Jewesses who want to be fashionable won’t come to ask me to paint their portraits any more?” he said.
“No, not that, of course. What does that matter?”
Evelyn finished putting his shoes and socks on.
“Then, really, I don’t understand what you do mean,” he said, “by my career, if you don’t refer to the class of person who thinks it a sort of cachet to be painted by me—though Heaven knows why she can think that. What are we talking about? How otherwise can my career, which is only my sense of form and colour, be touched?”
Madge’s eyes dreamed over the sea for a little at this.
“No, I was wrong,” she said. “Taken like that, it can’t matter. But we must (though I was wrong there, I am right here)—we must settle what we are going to do. We must go back some time; you must begin working again.”
Evelyn finished tying the last lace.
“Romney painted Lady Hamilton forty-three times,” he said. “I could paint forty Madges of the last hour. You never look the same for two minutes together, and I could paint all of you. Let’s have an exhibition next spring called ‘Some Aspects of the Honourable Mrs. Dundas. Artist—her husband.’”
“They would all come,” said Madge.
There was no more discussion on this present occasion about the future. Evelyn being again properly clothed, they went back by a short cut across the sand-dunes to the clearing in the forest behind, which was known as Le Touquet. For a space of their way, after they had got out of the pitiless sun on the sand, their path led through the primeval pine forest, where the air was redolent and aromatic, and the footfall went softly over the carpet of brown needles. Then other growths began, the white poplar of France shook tremulous leaves in fear of the wind that might be coming, young oak-trees stood sturdy and defiant where poplars trembled, and away from the pines the bare earth showed a carpet of excellent green. Then, as they approached the hotel, neat white boards with black arrows displayed signs in all directions, and a rustic bridge over a pond, by which stretched a green sward of lawn on which it was ‘defended to circulate,’ led to the gravel sweep in front of the hotel.