"As though it were round the corner! But these are very wonderful," she said, taking up the sketches. "I wish I were really like that."
"It's exactly you as you were at the moment."
"Nonsense," she said; but she glowed.
She knew it was not true, but she loved to believe he somehow, by some miracle, saw her so. The sketches were exquisite; little impressions of happy moments caught into immortality by a master. Hardly ever did he do more than her head and throat, and sometimes the delicate descent to her shoulder. The day she saw his idea of the back of her neck she flushed with pleasure, it was such a beautiful thing.
"That's not me," she murmured.
"Isn't it? I don't believe anybody has ever explained to you what you're like."
"There wasn't any need to. I can see for myself."
"Apparently that's just what you can't do. It was high time I came."
"Oh, but wasn't it," she agreed earnestly.
He thought her frankness, her unadorned way of saying what she felt, as refreshing and as surprising as being splashed with clear cold shining mountain water. He had never met anything feminine that was quite so near absolute simplicity. He might call her the most extravagantly flattering things, and she appreciated them and savoured them with a kind of objective delight that interested him at first extraordinarily. Then it began to annoy him.