"Am I paying enough to Providence for the joy of having him? Am I suffering enough to deserve him? If not, where is the payment to come in? Because it's got to come in somewhere. He's so much more alive than most other people. Will anything happen to him? Will he be taken away from me?"
CHAPTER XI THE ANGER OF LOVE
Only once in all his life has Little Yeogh Wough's love ever seemed to fail me, and that was at just about the time when his Public School career was coming to a close.
I had done a thing that I hardly ever do. I had defied one of my superstitions. And I had been punished for doing it.
My husband had asked me to let him paint my portrait. He had been asking me the same thing for years past, and I had always refused, remembering the injunction that: "Thou shalt not make to thyself the likeness of anything that is in the heavens above or the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth."
Of course I know there are sophistical people who make a point of mixing this commandment up with the sentence that follows it and pretending that it's only the bowing down and worshipping that are forbidden. But I know better. I have seen times without number the fate that has followed the person who, not being a royal personage or an actor or an actress, or a Lord Mayor, has indulged in the arrogant joy of having his portrait painted.
These exceptions that I have made are safe enough, because it is, as it were, a part of their business in life to have their portraits painted, as well as their photographs taken.
"It is really such an absurd idea of yours," my husband said to me. "It's all the purest nonsense. Of course a lot of people die directly they have had their portraits painted, but that's mainly because they're usually getting on for a hundred before they can afford to pay anybody to do them."