After a while she arose, reluctantly, and went back to the house and her rooms. She was remembering that she hadn't yet written to Jason, and she wanted Jason to know. Inside her sitting-room door she stopped short, eyes widened, lips fallen apart. On the mantel, glowing, jewel-like in the clear, pure light, herself confronted her. Herself as a great artist saw and loved her.
She stood transfixed. The sheer power and beauty of the work, that spell which falls upon one in the presence of all great art, held her entranced. Her own eyes looked, at her as if they challenged her; her own smile baffled her; there was that in the pictured face which brought a cry to her lips. Oh, was she so fair in his eyes? Only great love, as well as great genius, could have so portrayed her!
This was herself as she might be, grown finer, and of a larger faith, a deeper and sweeter charity. A sort of awe touched her. This man who loved her, who had the power of showing her herself as she might pray to become, this wonderful lover of hers, was no mere amateur with a pretty gift. This was one of the few, one of the torch-bearers!
And then she noticed the Red Admiral in the corner. She stared at it unbelievingly. That butterfly! Why—why—She had read of one who signed with a butterfly above his name pictures that were called great. A thought that made her brain swim and her heart beat suffocatingly crashed upon her like a clap of thunder. She walked toward the mantel like one in a daze, until she stood directly before the painting.
And it was his butterfly. And under it was his name: Peter Devereaux Champneys.
The room bobbed up and down. But she didn't faint, she didn't scream. She caught hold of the mantel to steady herself. She wondered how she hadn't known; she had the same sense of wild amazement that must fill one who has been brought face to face with a stupendous, a quite impossible miracle. Such a thing couldn't happen: and yet it is so! And oddly enough, out of this welter of her thoughts, there came to her memory a screened bed in a hospital ward, and a dying gutter-girl looking at her with unearthly eyes and telling her in a thin whisper:
"I wanted to see if you was good enough for him. You ain't. But remember what I'm tellin' you—you could be."
Pierre—Peter Champneys! She slipped to her knees and hid her face in her shaking hands. Peter Champneys! As in a lightning flash she saw him as that girl Gracie had seen him. Pierre—Pierre, with his eyes of an archangel, his lips that were the chrism of life—this was Peter Champneys! And she had hated him, let him go, all unknowing, she had wished to put in his place Berkeley Hayden. The handsome, worldly figure of Hayden seemed to dwindle and shrink. Pierre stood as on a height, looking at her steadfastly. Her head went lower. Tears trickled between her fingers.
You ain't good enough for him, but you could be.
"I can be, I can be! Oh, God, I can be! Only let him love me—when he knows!"