“He’s off to London to stay with his duchesses and the like and he’ll want no dinner until he orders it again, and for all you know he’ll never come back!”
“Let him stay away then!” says a muffled tragic voice, evidently from the depths of the pillow. “You won’t need to fry the fish for dinner. That’s all the difference.”
“You fool, you!” says the pursy old lady outside and begins slowly to retreat to the stair-head, making her departure as noisy as possible that she may be recalled.
In a moment the door was open and Emma in crumpled white gown and loosened hair framed in it, a hand on either jamb.
“Where did he say he was going?”
“To some duchess. I don’t know who. Yes, Gargyle, or something.”
“Then I’m going out too. I shall go to Romney’s. Give me the basket.”
With furiously flushed cheeks, she began smoothing her hair and the rumples from her dress, a bitter sense of slighting contempt spurring her to defiance. She would not eat, would not delay, would have a hackney coach, and so off with her to Cavendish Square and Romney.
You are to imagine her entering that home of her delight with a softly falling footstep, for it came upon her always with the calm experienced in leaving busy streets behind and breathing the dim quiet of a church with shapes of silent beauty in jewelled window and faint gold, illuminated only by steadfast altar lights. This was her paradise, her church, for this girl of the people was a true believer of the religion of beauty; its priestess also, for she protested its creed in every lovely movement, in delicious voice and melting attitudes, and often winged hearts higher than they knew as they watched her. She was no priestess like the heavy-lidded women who served dark goddesses in Assyrian or Egyptian temples to snare men’s souls in the bird-lime of the pit; yet, for all this, she brought men infallibly to her level when they loved her; dyed them, all but Greville, of her own colour, and whether that level was in the heights or the depths, let the reader judge as this history unrolls. Certainly, two, the greatest, thanked God they had known her, whatever the loud-mouthed world might say. And of these, one was Romney.
The studio was large, and full of light as clear and thin as water from the tall north window. He sat bending over a table with his back to her, as though making some sketch-note that had suddenly struck his fancy. He did not hear the door open, but when her foot touched the bare floor, he said without moving, “Emma! Come in, child,” and went quietly on with his work.