He bowed, still smiling.
“Eleanor Wyndwood,” she added, “to explain my friend’s abbreviation, which always puzzles strangers.”
“Everybody knows Nor stands for Eleanor,” remonstrated her friend. “Do they suppose your name is Norval?”
Mrs. Wyndwood’s smile met the painter’s.
“And now, if my punctilious friend is satisfied, let me introduce Miss Regan.”
Miss Regan gave him her hand cordially.
“Where are your pictures to be found, Mr. Strang?” she asked. “We haven’t been to the Academy before, and we should so like to save the shilling.”
“Oh, they’re not worth looking at,” he said, uncomfortably. He suddenly felt ashamed of them. It was thus that he had felt more than two years ago, when, over her strawberries and cream, Mrs. Wyndwood had lectured him for artistic aloofness from the travail of the time, insisting that it was the mission of all forms of Art to express the aspiration of the century towards a higher and juster social life, towards the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, and that it would be honester for him to plough the land than to paint decorative pictures for the dining-rooms of capitalists. He had scarcely taken in her point of view, more persuaded by her presence than by her words, by some intangible radiation of earnestness and goodness from the lovely face and the soulful gray eyes, and less ashamed of the sinfulness of his own artistic standpoint than of the often meretricious quality of his performance. She had been the first woman to speak slightingly of his rôle in the world, and her dispraise, co-operating, as it did, with his own discontent, had impressed him more than all the praise, just as one unfavorable newspaper critique rankled, while a hundred eulogies passed across consciousness, scarcely ruffling its waves.
When the flux of the garden-party had drifted her off in the wake of Gerard Brode, the handsome young Socialist, he had felt that he, too, might have become a Socialist or a ploughboy, or even an honest painter, under the inspiration of her enthusiastic eyes. He had thought of her for several months, almost as a creature of dream, so swift and shadowy had been her flitting across his horizon, and she had easily lent herself to that conception of Ideal Womanhood which the world had not yet destroyed, because the world had not created it. It was under the impulsion of the eloquent play of light across her face that he had conceived and painted that allegory of woman’s inspiration which Herbert, unable to read in it the pathetic expression of the painter’s dissatisfaction at once with real womanhood and his own work, had found so amusing, and he was startled now to see how nearly he had reproduced her traits in his conception of the figure on the mountain-top; not so much, perhaps, in the features, in which the slight upward tilt of the nose was omitted and the size of the ears diminished, as in the clustering chestnut hair, with gold lights in it, and in the poise of the head, the long, thin Botticelli hands, the small feet, and the graceful curves of the rather tall form, and, above all, in the expression that seemed to suffuse her face with spiritual effluence. The first impression renewed itself in all its depth; he asked himself with amazement how he could have let the waves of life wash it away so completely that even Herbert’s inquiry about the picture had not recalled her clearly to his memory.
“Oh, but I want to see your pictures,” she said. “There’s a ‘Triumph of Bacchus,’ I hear. I saw the fresco—by Caracci, wasn’t it?—in the Farnese Palace, in Rome, on our homeward journey. We’ve been in Russia, Miss Regan and I, with Monsieur and Madame Dolkovitch, to see Podnieff in his dairy-farm. Oh! he’s so charming—so simple and saintly. He enables one to construct St. Francis of Assisi.”