He went away, startled and puzzled.
Next week, as he came in, eager for one more look at that disconcerting caricature, he found the artist painting it out with a thin grey wash.
“Why do you do that?” he asked.
“Oh, that was only to get the pose,” she said. “This time I want to get the likeness.”
The portrait seemed to Felix completed at the end of an hour, when she declared the sitting over and took off her apron. It was utterly different from the crayon caricature which had preceded it on the canvas. Out of the misty grey background emerged a face and two hands, delicately painted, and catching the quizzical expression of mouth and eyes and the rather limp gesture of the hands, but in a manner which did not carry more than a few feet from the canvas. Moreover, this painting was utterly unlike the other things of hers that he had seen. He wondered, but the painter had hung up her apron and was looking at a portfolio of drawings, indifferent to his existence, so he withdrew.
The next time provided still a new surprise. The painter had just washed out the face and hands on the canvas with turpentine, and was scraping off the paint when he came in. Was this a confession of failure? or some new way of painting? or simply the way all painters went to work?
He was pretty certain, however, that the method pursued in this present sitting was extraordinary; for this time the painter measured his head with a pair of calipers, up and down and in every direction, and noted down the figures on a piece of paper and regarded them thoughtfully. Then she came up to him and felt of his skull with her hands; it was not in the least like a caress—it was exactly as if she were a surgeon, and he were a patient, about to be operated upon.
“Bones!” she said, as if that explained everything, and went to work on her canvas with a brush dipped in blue paint.... The result, which Felix viewed with a very queer sensation at the end of the sitting, was a skeleton-like figure done in blue, with arms and legs like pieces of steel machinery, and a face with dark blue eye sockets and a pale blue jaw.... “Lines of force,” explained the painter, and he went away not knowing whether to laugh or not.
This skeleton was obliterated at the beginning of the fourth sitting, as the other stages of the picture had been, and Felix wondered, what next? Colour, it seemed, this time! Great splashes and daubs of colour, put on anyhow, spread out with a palette-knife, or the painter’s thumb—a riot, an orgy of rose and green and purple-brown, with only a suggestion of Felix amid the chromatic swirls....
Felix described each of these stages to Rose-Ann with zest, and went with infinite curiosity to every new sitting....