“You know,” he said, as he turned his head and moved his hands over the study as if drawing in the air, “you know it ought somehow to seem silent, and cool, and remote; for it is ancient Greece, Diana, and midnight. You see?”
Then came a vast cloud of smoke from his mouth, as if to assist the eyes of the spectator.
“Oh yes, I see,” said every one of his companions—especially Lawrence Newt, who did see, indeed, but saw only a head of Hope Wayne in a mist. The Endymion, the mountain, the Greece, the antiquity, were all vigorous assumptions of the artist. The study for his great picture was simply an unfinished portrait of Hope Wayne.
Aunt Winnifred, who sometimes came into her nephew’s studio, saw the study one day, and exclaimed, sorrowfully,
“Oh, Arthur! Arthur!”
The young man, who was busily mixing colors upon his pallet, and humming, as he smoked, “‘Tis my delight of a shiny night,” turned in dismay, thinking his aunt was suddenly ill.
“My dear aunt!” and he laid down his pallet and ran toward her.
She was sitting in an armchair holding the study. Arthur stopped.
“My dear Arthur, now I understand all.”
Arthur Merlin was confused. He, perhaps, suspected that his picture of Diana resembled a certain young lady. But how should Aunt Winnifred know it, who, as he supposed, had never seen her? Besides, he felt it was a disagreeable thing, when he was and had been in love with a young lady for a long time, to have his aunt say that she understood all about it. How could she understand all about it? What right has any body to say that she understands all about it? He asked himself the petulant question because he was very sure that he himself did not by any means understand all about it.