“Now!” said Carrigan.
She rose and faced him.
“What’s happened?” she cried, for his lower jaw had fallen.
He swallowed twice before he could answer.
“I’m beginning to see your face!”
For the face, after all, is like any picture. The hair is the frame, and an ugly frame will spoil the most lovely painting. The eye does not stop at a boundary. It includes it.
“Once more!” said Carrigan, and seized the vanishing cream.
As he worked now he felt like the artist who draws the human face from the block of marble. He felt as Michelangelo when the grim old Florentine said: “I do not create; I take off the outer layers of the stone and free the form which is hidden within.” Or perhaps he was more like Pygmalion and the inevitable statue when the artist saw the first hues of life faintly flushing in the cold marble.
When he stepped back and looked at her, she seemed strangely aloof. She had drawn away a thousand miles and a thousand years. He discovered the most ancient of truths, that a beautiful woman is a world in herself upon which all men must look from the outside. She escapes from experience. It cannot stain her. She escapes from herself. Her beauty is greater than her soul.
“It’s done,” said Carrigan sadly.