"I thought you so awfully wanted me to paint," he gasped, flushed and staring.
"I do—I do. That's why you must be free, why we must part?"
"Why we must part—?"
"Oh I've turned it well over. I've faced the hard truth. It wouldn't do at all!" Julia rang out.
"I like the way you talk of it—as if it were a trimming for your dress!" Nick retorted with bitterness. "Won't it do for you to be loved and cherished as well as any woman in England?"
She turned away from him, closing her eyes as not to see something dangerous. "You mustn't give anything up for me. I should feel it all the while and I should hate it. I'm not afraid of the truth, but you are."
"The truth, dear Julia? I only want to know it," Nick insisted. "It seems to me in fact just what I've got hold of. When two persons are united by the tenderest affection and are sane and generous and just, no difficulties that occur in the union their life makes for them are insurmountable, no problems are insoluble."
She appeared for a moment to reflect upon this: it was spoken in a tone that might have touched her. Yet at the end of the moment, lifting her eyes, she brought out: "I hate art, as you call it. I thought I did, I knew I did; but till this morning I didn't know how much."
"Bless your dear soul, that wasn't art," Nick pleaded. "The real thing will be a thousand miles away from us; it will never come into the house, soyez tranquille. It knows where to look in and where to flee shrieking. Why then should you worry?"
"Because I want to understand, I want to know what I'm doing. You're an artist: you are, you are!" Julia cried, accusing him passionately.