She laughed lightly:
“You’re a charming colourist, Paul—but all your craft cannot whitewash spite,” she said.
“No, no,” said he. “I only say that criticism has its shabby side. Spite is criticism gone sour.... But, tsha! I don’t believe there is all this venom in the world.” He laid down his palette: “It’s a very comfortable old world.... I’m afraid the light has gone.”
He pushed the easel aside, and came to where she sat. He set a foot on the throne, and leaned his elbow upon his knee, gazing into her eyes:
“The light has gone, and your great beauty calls for all the light—it dares the sun’s severest cross-examination.”
He held out his hand and she placed her slender fingers in his; she felt his admiring regard upon her. He pressed her fingers:
“You are firing my art as it has never been fired—you have given my craft all that it has lacked—yet your beauty, that exquisite thing over which you have no control, which is of no willing of yours, not even your own gift to yourself, is so subtle, so elusive, so wonderful, that all the colours of my art, all my knowledge of their use, cannot give more than a hint of that which you have, and without the asking. You are the living thing—I can at best but paint some poor suggestion of it. And when I have done, what is there in all my effort of the warmth and the sweetness, of the mystic fragrance of you?... Yet”—he played with her fingers—“yet,” he added, “you are giving me that inspiration that will set me above my fellows—the artist has never been anything of moment until fired by the flame of a great passion—and it may be that your beauty will make my art to glow and live.”
“I am glad,” she said, “if I—have——”
She hesitated prettily, and he kissed her fingers.
She was really thinking that this was a doing of the thing handsomely, but young Nick Bellenden of the Guards talked less and made of loving a more exciting affair. After all, the embrace was chief part of the business—not this dandified talk.