He was standing in his studio before Erika's unfinished portrait--unfinished!
"It must be finished at the next sitting. For the last ten days I have simply put off its completion from one sitting to the next, and all because I cannot tell how I can endure seeing her no more. And, yet, to what can it all lead?"
He was very pale, and the moisture stood upon his forehead. He would have turned away from the portrait, but was drawn towards it as by a spell. "A glorious creature!" he murmured; "and not only beautiful, but absolutely unique. It raises a man's moral standard to be with such a creature. H'm! before I knew her I was not aware that I had a moral standard." He laughed bitterly, and continued to gaze at the picture. "She is beautiful!" he muttered between his teeth. "It is folly for a being like her to be so beautiful,--a waste,--a contradiction of nature!" He stamped his foot, vexed that any but the purest thoughts should intrude upon his admiration of Erika. "A strange creature! What eyes!--so clear, so deep, so penetrating!" He could think of nothing save of her; his nerves thrilled with passion for her.
Strive as he might, his artist imagination could not force itself from the contemplation of her beauty.
He loved her; he had known that for some time. But hitherto his love for her had been a tender, noble sentiment, something of which he had not supposed himself capable, something that exalted him in his own estimation. He had been refreshed, revived, by her presence, by intercourse with her. But that was past.
"The charm of love is the dream that precedes it," he murmured. The dream was over: what now?
Then an insane idea occurred to him: "She is unlike all others: there is a magnanimous, exaggerated strain in her composition, which exalts her above all pettiness. If she loved me, could she ever have been induced to marry me?"
He shivered. "No! no! it is worse than folly to imagine it. In spite of all her enthusiasm, in spite of her immense power of compassion, she is too much the Countess to ever dream of such a possibility."
His lips were dry; an iron hand seemed clutching his throat. He turned his back to the picture and went out into the garden. The skies were covered with gray clouds: the flowers drooped; there was a distant mutter of thunder.
"Yet if it could be!" he murmured.