Greatly to his surprise, René shook his head.
“C’est impossible,” he said conclusively.
François wondered, but the conversation turned immediately upon other matters, and it was only just before he took leave, when Anne was out of the room, that his friend took a book from one of the shelves, and turning over the leaves, handed it to him at an open page.
“That’s why I can’t paint her,” he said.
The poem he touched with his forefinger was Browning’s song beginning—
“Nay, but you who do not love her,
Is she not pure gold, my mistress?”
François read it aloud, and came to the last few lines—
“Then why not witness, calmly gazing,
If earth holds aught—speak truth—above her?