Some dozen people passed him, glanced at him and his small statue, but he would have passed unnoticed had a lady not come slowly down the steps and seen him, stopped and looked at him, though he did not see her until she had approached. He flamed scarlet, covered his statuette and wished that the cobbles of the pavement would open and swallow him.
She was—he thought of it afterward a hundred times—a woman of singular tact and an illumined sympathy, as well as a woman of exquisite comprehension.
"Mr. Rainsford!" she exclaimed. "You have something to sell?" she added, and simply, as though she spoke to an ordinary vendor, yet he saw that as she spoke a lovely colour rose in her cheek under her veil, and he found that he was not ashamed any more.
She put out her hand. It came from a mantle of velvet and a cuff of costly fur—he couldn't have dreamt then how costly. He lifted his hat, bareheaded in the cold, and laid the little figure in her hand.
"How perfectly charming!" she murmured, holding it. And the dryad-like figure, with its slender arms above its head and the faun-like, brilliant little face, seemed perfection to her. She said so. "What a perfect thing! Of course, you have the clay original?"
Fairfax could not speak. The sight of this woman so worldly, elegant, sumptuous, at the first praise of his little statue, he realized that he was selling it, and it struck him as a crime—his creation, his vision, hawking it as a fish-wife might hawk crabs in the public street!
He felt a great humiliation and could have wept—indeed, tears did spring to his eyes and the cold dried them.
Two "sergents de ville" came up to them.
"Pardon, Monsieur," asked one of them, "have you a license?"