It seemed to leave him with the moral of this. "Then, if our hands are clean, what are we talking about?"
I turned, on it, a little more to him, and looked at him so long that he had at last to look at me; with which, after holding his eyes another moment, I made my point. "Our hands are not clean."
"Ah, speak for your own!"—and as he moved back I might really have thought him uneasy. There was a hint of the same note in the way he went on: "I assure you I decline all responsibility. I see the responsibility as quite beautifully yours."
"Well," I said, "I only want to be fair. You were the first to bring it out that she was changed."
"Well, she isn't changed!" said my friend with an almost startling effect, for me, of suddenness. "Or rather," he immediately and incongruously added, "she is. She's changed back."
"'Back'?" It made me stare.
"Back," he repeated with a certain sharpness and as if to have done at last, for himself, with the muddle of it.
But there was that in me that could let him see he had far from done; and something, above all, told me now that he absolutely mustn't have before I had. I quickly moreover saw that I must, with an art, make him want not to. "Back to what she was when you painted her?"
He had to think an instant for this. "No—not quite to that."
"To what then?"