“Don’t, please, be shy,” her voice met him, the calm voice, “for I’m quite shy enough for two. And I asked you in because I want you to talk to me—just a little.”
He came forward towards her across the rugs that strewed the parquet floor. There were many things in that room, chairs and footstools and sofas of quality, but yet it was a room for leisured feet, a room easy to move in. She stood by the nobly carven fireplace, a figure in chinchilla, under which was visible a low-cut black dress: and this shone a little as though it were made of black armour, even as black sequins do sometimes shine.
“Well, it makes a man shy,” he protested, “to try to live up to the fact that you’ve let him speak to you.”
The candid eyes of the tall lady examined him; they were gray eyes, wide and inquiring and amazingly innocent, and now there was a subtle light of laughter in them, as though she was infinitely but quietly amused about something. But he did not meet her eyes, for his were suddenly engrossed in a large portrait on a farther wall, a portrait startling and remarkable even in that dim light. It was a portrait in oils of a woman in a green dress sitting in a high-backed chair, and her head was pressed back against the back of the chair so that her throat was a clean and white line, and appalling in its suggestion of luxuriance; and the eyes of the woman in the green dress, as her head leant back against her chair, had in them the frightening candour of innocence, and they laughed at you, without mockery, as though she was infinitely but quietly amused about something; and her hair was golden, and yet only a fool would have called it golden, for it was of the colour of fallen leaves on an October afternoon, russet brown and very dull gold shot with a fantasy of carmine. Anyway, the colour of her hair was more like that of an October leaf than anything else, and as for her dress, who shall describe that green dress? For it was a strange and surprising dress, yet it was not a cheeky dress but witty, and it required from its wearer more than the virtue of dignity, though even that is a considerable virtue in young women nowadays. At its foot was just visible the sweet tip of a cherry shoe—but at its other end, the queenly end, at that end where a dress must die so that a woman’s flesh may live for men’s admiration and distress, at that end where a dress curves in glorious luxury over breasts and dies in a last effort to reach and clutch a slender throat! What of that queenly end of that green dress? It was contrived, without detracting an iota from the elegant formality of its wearer, so that it swept in a thin green strand from the bosom over one shoulder—and never returned over the other! for that other shoulder was startling white and naked, it was the kind of shoulder that men dream about in lonely moments; it was a shoulder wantonly divorced from the green dress which curved, ever so luxuriously, over but half one of the breasts of the subtly laughing woman with the eyes of innocent candour. And Ivor stared at her.
“Ah, yes,” he said, towards the portrait, “I know you now. I know you well.”
“Oh, but am I so famous then!” the lady cried pathetically, and Ivor turned to her thoughtfully.
“That portrait is famous,” he said. “It set every one talking, even in war-time—and it set me longing. Years ago....”
The “Portrait of Pamela Star,” by Augustus John—who, in the autumn of 1916, when it was on exhibition at the Grosvenor Galleries, did not hear of it? Never did portrait create such a stir or leave such an impression as the portrait of Pamela Star. The Daily Mail at once called her a “mystery woman,” and the Evening News discovered a theory that the lovely creature was a Belgian refugee whom Major John had rescued at the risk of his life; and tried to interview the artist, but failed deplorably. And though there were not wanting fellow-artists to say that the portrait was a literary masterpiece rather than a painting, which is a boring remark and means nothing, and though Mr. George Moore was heard to say, as he walked away from a long contemplation of the portrait, that painting had died with Manet—yet it was commonly admitted that whereas Gainsborough had painted a lady like a landscape, Augustus John had made a lady into a legend; and what lady, it was asked, would not rather be a legend than a landscape?
“I was on leave in 1916,” Ivor told her, “and I happened to walk into the Grosvenor Galleries. And there you were! You were a great help to me, Pamela Star. You were indeed....”
“And were you as curious about me then as you are courteous now?” she asked him with a smile. They were standing close together, the room was an island and they were solitary and close on it; she smiled at him curiously; and Ivor had a funny feeling that he had never yet met a woman with such a clean, unveiled smile: absolutely frank. And he wondered about her age, thinking it must be that mysterious and intangible age which lies somewhere between twenty-five and thirty.