The turban was loosened and held in her hands as she stood there looking. The picture evidently attracted her, though it did not please. At last she turned to the artist.
“Why do you paint pictures like that?”
“Like that? Pouf! You mean beautiful?”
“No, it is not beautiful,” she said, thoughtfully, as she seated herself on the dais by the dowager’s couch. “To be truly beautiful a thing must impress one with a sense of fitness to our highest perceptive faculties. A soulless thing is never beautiful.”
“What then, of dogs, horses, lions, the many art works in metal or on canvas?”
“You must not raise that wall against her words, Loris, unless you wish to quarrel,” said the dowager in friendly warning. “Judithe is pantheist enough to fancy that animals have souls.”
“But the true artist does not seek to portray the lowest expression of that soul,” persisted Dumaresque’s critic. “Across the Atlantic there are thousands who contend that a woman such as this Kora whom you paint, has no soul because of the black blood in her veins. They think of the dark people as we think of apes. It is all a question of longitude, Monsieur Dumaresque. The crudeness of America is 13 the jest of France. The wisdom of France is the lightest folly of the Brahims; and so it goes ever around the world. The soul of that girl will weigh as heavily as ours in the judgment that is final; but, in the meantime, why teach it and others to admire all that allurement of evil showing in her eyes as she looks at you?”
“Judithe!” protested the dowager.
“Oh!––I do not doubt in the least, Maman, that the woman Kora looked just so when she sat for the picture,” conceded the girl; “but why not endeavor to awaken a higher, stronger expression, and paint that, showing the better possibilities within her than mere seductiveness?”
“What fervor and what folly, Marquise!” cried Dumaresque. “It is a speech of folly only because it is I whom you ask to be the missionary, and because it is the pretty Kora you would ask me to convert––and to what? Am I so perfect in all ways that I dare preach, even with paint and brush? Heavens! I should have all Paris laughing at me.”