Vous regarderiez ma fenêtre
Comme au hasard.’
‘It is not very good,’ said Sara, apologetically; ‘it is a stupid, sentimental little thing after all.’
‘As you have sketched it, it is,’ he answered, and said no more.
Sara, with an uneasy thrill of feeling, remembered his words to her at Trockenau: ‘If I thought it atrocious, I am afraid I should say it was so, much though I might dislike having to do it.’
She felt that he had just now said ‘atrocious,’ or something very like it, and her heart sank. Silently she placed another canvas above the first. It was a vague, indistinct scene; what appeared some wild, wind-blown trees on rising ground to the left—clouds riven asunder, and silvered by a moon which did not actually appear; the hint of a deep, rapid, sullen stream, with tall rushes, in the foreground.
‘That is imaginary!’ he said abruptly, ‘You did not go to Nature for this.’
‘No, not altogether. It is—it is only a sketch.’
‘Scarcely that. Is it meant to typify anything?’
‘I believe I was thinking of Shelley’s stanzas: “Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon!” But it is bad. I have failed,’ she added, a sudden sense of being very small and insignificant rushing over her, and also a conviction of how entirely she had failed.