'How kind you are!' she cried. 'How very, very kind! I do not quite follow the idea—my head is always so tired now—but I knew you would understand how I should feel—if I accepted it without any return!'
So far as arithmetic went, the man of genius and the broken-hearted girl were equally far from ordinary reckoning. Durand knew that by a turn of luck he had been able to keep the only portrait he had ever been sorry to part with when it was finished, and he was intimately convinced that he owed somebody something for such an unexpected pleasure; on her side, Angela was quite sure that unless the portrait of the man she had loved was to be an equivalent for some sort of obligation she could not be satisfied to keep it all her life unpaid for.
It filled the little sitting-room with light and colour, as a Titian might have done; it was as intensely alive as Giovanni Severi had been—the eyes were full of those quick little coruscations of fire that had made them so unlike those of other men, the impulsive nostrils seemed to quiver, the healthy young blood seemed to come and go in the tanned cheeks, the square shoulders were just ready to make that quick, impatient little movement that had been so characteristic of him, so like the sudden tension of every muscle when a thoroughbred scents sport or danger. No ordinary artist would ever have seen all there was in the man, even in a dozen sittings, but the twin gifts of sight and memory had unconsciously absorbed and held the whole, and a skill that was never outdone in its time had made memory itself visible on the canvas. Something that was neither a 'harmless illness' nor a 'miracle' had waked Angela from her torpor.
'How can I thank you?' she asked, after a long pause. 'You do not know what it is to me to see his living face—you will call it an illusion—it seems as if——'
She broke off suddenly and pressed her handkerchief to her lips again.
'Only what you call the unreal can last unchanged for a while,' the painter said, catching at the word she had used, and thinking more of his art than of her. 'Only an ideal can be eternal, but every honest attempt to give it shape has a longer life than any living creature. Nature makes only to destroy, but art creates for the very sake of preserving the beautiful.'
She heard each sentence, but was too absorbed in the portrait to follow his meaning closely. Perhaps it would have escaped her if she had tried.
'Only good and evil are everlasting,' she said, almost unconsciously repeating words she had heard somewhere when she was a child.
Durand looked at her quickly, but he saw that she was not really thinking.
'What is "good"?' he asked, as if he were sure that there was no answer to the question.