"Ingeborg," he said, his eyes blazing at her in a bright astonishment, "do you mean to tell me that I shall not reach you, that I'm not going to get ever at you till I paint you?"
She turned in the gloom and looked up at him.
"Oh, I know I'll get you then," he went on excitedly, while the interrupted beadle impatiently rattled his keys. "Nothing can hide you away from me then. I don't paint, you see, by myself—"
She stared up at him.
"And all this you're doing, all this waste of running about—have you then forgotten the picture?"
It was as though he had shaken her suddenly awake. She stared at him in a shock of recollection. Why, of course—the picture. Why—incredible, but she had forgotten it. Actually forgotten it in the wild excitement of travelling; actually she had been wanting to linger at each new place, she who had only ten days altogether, she who had come only after all because of the picture, the great picture, the first really great thing that had touched her life. And here she was with him, its waiting creator, dragging him about who held future beauty in his cunning guided hand among all the mixed stuff left as a burden on the generations by the past, curious about the stuff with an uneducated stupid curiosity, wasting time, ridiculously blocking the way to something great, to the greatest of the achievements of a great artist.
She was sobered. She was overcome by the vivid recognition of her cheap enthusiasm.
"Oh," she said, staring up at him, wide awake, entirely ashamed, "how patient you've been with me!"
And as he still held her by the arm, his eyes blazing down at her from the top step of the crypt, she could find no way of expressing her shame and contrition except by bending her head and laying her cheek on his hand.