"Gabriel Nash—as a substitute for you?"
"It will be a good way to get rid of him. Paint Mrs. Dallow too," Miriam went on as she passed out of the door he had opened for her—"paint Mrs. Dallow if you wish to eradicate the last possibility of a throb."
It was strange that, since only a moment before he had been in a state of mind to which the superfluity of this reference would have been the clearest thing about it, he should now have been moved to receive it quickly, naturally, irreflectively, receive it with the question: "The last possibility? Do you mean in her or in me?"
"Oh in you. I don't know anything about 'her.'"
"But that wouldn't be the effect," he argued with the same supervening candour. "I believe that if she were to sit to me the usual law would be reversed."
"The usual law?"
"Which you cited a while since and of which I recognised the general truth. In the case you speak of," he said, "I should probably make a shocking picture."
"And fall in love with her again? Then for God's sake risk the daub!" Miriam laughed out as she floated away to her victoria.