'Yes,' she said, rising and holding out her hand half-unconsciously for her cloak, which she put round her as though the wood had suddenly grown cold; 'admiration for me as a woman, contempt for me as an artist! There's the whole bare truth. Does it hold my future in it, I wonder? Is there nothing in me but this beauty that people talk of, and which I sometimes hate?'
She swept her hair back from her forehead with a fierce dramatic gesture. It was as though the self in her was rising up and asserting itself against the judgment which had been passed upon it, as if some hidden force hardly suspected even by herself were beating against its bars. Kendal watched her in helpless silence. 'Tell me,' she said, fixing her deep hazel eyes upon him, 'you owe it me—you have given me so much pain. No, no; you did not mean it. But tell me, and tell me from the bottom of your heart—that is, if you are interested enough in me—what is it I want? What is it that seems to be threatening me with failure as an artist? I work all day long, my work is never out of my head; it seems to pursue me all night. But the more I struggle with it the less successful I seem even to myself.'
Her look was haunting: there was despair and there was hope in it. It implied that she had set him up in her impulsive way as a sort of oracle who alone could help her out of her difficulty. In presence of that look his own conventionality fell away from him, and he spoke the plain, direct truth to her.
'What you want,' he said slowly, as if the words were forced from him, 'is knowledge! London has taught you much, and that is why you are dissatisfied with your work—it is the beginning of all real success. But you want positive knowledge—the knowledge you could get from books, and the knowledge other people could teach you. You want a true sense of what has been done and what can be done with your art, and you want an insight into the world of ideas lying round it and about it. You are very young, and you have had to train yourself. But every human art nowadays is so complicated that none of us can get on without using the great stores of experience others have laid up for us.'
It was all out now. He had spoken his inmost mind. They had stopped again, and she was looking at him intently; it struck him that he could not possibly have said what he had been saying unless he had been led on by an instinctive dependence upon a great magnanimity of nature in her. And then the next moment the strange opposites the matter held in it flashed across him. He saw the crowded theatre, the white figure on the stage, his ear seemed to be full of the clamour of praise with which London had been overwhelming its favourite. It was to this spoilt child of fortune that he had been playing the schoolmaster—he, one captious man of letters, against the world.
But she had not a thought of the kind, or rather, the situation presented itself to her in exactly the contrary light. To her Kendal's words, instead of being those of a single critic, were the voice and the embodiment of a hundred converging impressions and sensations, and she felt a relief in having analysed to the full the vague trouble which had been settling upon her by this unraveling of her own feelings and his.
'I am very grateful to you,' she said steadily; 'very. It is strange, but almost when I first saw you I felt that there was something ominous in you to me. My dream, in which I have been living, has never been so perfect since, and now I think it has gone. Don't look so grieved,' she cried, inexpressibly touched by his face, 'I am glad you told me all you thought. It will be a help to me. And as for poor Elvira,' she added, trying to smile for all her extreme paleness, 'tell Mr. Wallace I give her up. I am not vexed, I am not angry. Don't you think now we had better go back to Mrs. Stuart? I should like a rest with her before we all meet again.'
She moved forward as she spoke, and it seemed to Kendal that her step was unsteady and that she was deadly white. He planted himself before her in the descending path, and held out a hand to her to help her. She gave him her own, and he carried it impetuously to his lips.
'You are nobleness itself!' he cried, from the depths of his heart. 'I feel as if I had been the merest pedant and blunderer—the most incapable, clumsy idiot.'
She smiled, but she could not answer. And in a few more moments voices and steps could be heard approaching, and the scene was over.