“Its beauty, though,” she reflected, “is n't exactly of the obvious sort—is it? It does n't jump at you, for instance. It is rather in the texture of the work, than on the surface. One has to look, to see it.”
“One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing,” he safely generalised. But then—he had put his foot in the stirrup—his hobby bolted with him. “It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the artist. The artist does his work—the beholder must do his. They are collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be like each other—with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art, in short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty that jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of—is the skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really beauty at all—it is only an approximation to beauty—it may be only a simulacrum of it.”
Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest, with friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something else—perhaps with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amusement; but interest was easily predominant.
“Yes,” she assented.... But then she pursued her own train of ideas. “And—with you—I particularly like the woman—Pauline. I can't tell you how much I like her. I—it sounds extravagant, but it's true—I can think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so well—who makes so curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit—her waywardness—her tenderness—her generosity—everything. How did your friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as any woman I have ever known she's more real to me than most of the women I know—she's absolutely real, she lives, she breathes. Yet I have never known a woman resembling her. Life would be a merrier business if one did know women resembling her. She seems to me all that a woman ought ideally to be. Does your friend know women like that—the lucky man? Or is Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?”
“Ah,” said Peter, laughing, “you touch the secret springs of my friend's inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix Wildmay is a perfectly commonplace Englishman. How could a woman like Pauline be the creature of his imagination? No—she was a 'thing seen.' God made her. Wildmay was a mere copyist. He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from a woman who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the story.”
The Duchessa's eyes were intent.
“The story-? Tell me the story,” she pronounced in a breath, with imperious eagerness.
And her eyes waited, intently.
“Oh,” said Peter, “it's one of those stories that can scarcely be told. There's hardly any thing to take hold of. It's without incident, without progression—it's all subjective—it's a drama in states of mind. Pauline was a 'thing seen,' indeed; but she wasn't a thing known: she was a thing divined. Wildmay never knew her—never even knew who she was—never knew her name—never even knew her nationality, though, as the book shows, he guessed her to be an Englishwoman, married to a Frenchman. He simply saw her, from a distance, half-a-dozen times perhaps. He saw her in Paris, once or twice, at the theatre, at the opera; and then later again, once or twice, in London; and then, once more, in Paris, in the Bois. That was all, but that was enough. Her appearance—her face, her eyes, her smile, her way of carrying herself, her way of carrying her head, her gestures, her movements, her way of dressing—he never so much as heard her voice—her mere appearance made an impression on him such as all the rest of womankind had totally failed to make. She was exceedingly lovely, of course, exceedingly distinguished, noble-looking; but she was infinitely more. Her face her whole person—had an expression! A spirit burned in her—a prismatic, aromatic fire. Other women seemed dust, seemed dead, beside her. She was a garden, inexhaustible, of promises, of suggestions. Wit, capriciousness, generosity, emotion—you have said it—they were all there. Race was there, nerve. Sex was there—all the mystery, magic, all the essential, elemental principles of the Feminine, were there: she was a woman. A wonderful, strenuous soul was there: Wildmay saw it, felt it. He did n't know her—he had no hope of ever knowing her—but he knew her better than he knew any one else in the world. She became the absorbing subject of his thoughts, the heroine of his dreams. She became, in fact, the supreme influence of his life.”
The Duchessa's eyes had not lost their intentness, while he was speaking. Now that he had finished, she looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, and mused for a moment in silence. At last she looked up again.