He began to study her face with a view to painting it, and he was absorbed and fascinated by it. The lines of her cheek and of her neck made him itch to draw them.
“Yes,” he said, “I must paint you. I can do something good. I’m sure I can.”
“I wanted to ask if you would mind my painting you,” she said.
He was aghast at her impudence. She, a slip of a girl, a “top-knot,” paint the great Kühler!
She saw how horrified he was and added hastily:—
“Of course, I won’t insist if you don’t like sitting.”
She rose to go and he begged her to stay.
“Don’t go yet,” he said with sudden emotion. “I don’t want you to go. Somehow I feel as if you had been sitting there always and I don’t want you to go. If you don’t want to talk you needn’t, but you must stay. I could see that my mother liked you at once, and she always knows good people. You made her happy about me. It was like sunshine to her when you came in, and I shall be wretched if you go, for I don’t know what to think about you.”
“I know what I think about you.”
“What do you think?”