As I spoke—holding the sketch up where the light from the room within fell on what I had no doubt was a likeness of some fair face that had beguiled his time in days gone by, a souvenir of one of his loves more lasting than souvenirs of such episodes in one's life often are, if merely trusted to that inconstant capricieuse, Memory,—I might have hit him with a bullet rather than asked him about a mere etude à deux crayons, for he shuddered, and drank off some white Hermitage quickly.
"I had forgotten that was in the portfolio," he said, hurriedly, as he took it from me and put it behind him, with its face against the wall, as though it had been the sketch of a Medusa.
"What do you take it away for? I had not half done looking at it. Who is the original?"
"One I don't care to mention."
"Because?"
"Because the sight of that picture gives me a twinge of what I ought to be hardened against—regret."
"Regret! Is any woman worth that?"
"She was."
"I don't believe it; and I fancied you and I thought alike on such points. Of all the women for whom we feel twinges of conscience or self-reproach in melancholy moments, how many loved us? Moralists and poets sentimentalize over it, and make it a stalking-horse whereby to magnify our sins and consign us more utterly to perdition, while they do for themselves a little bit of poetic morality cheaply; but in reality there are uncommonly few women who can love, to begin with, and in the second, vanity, avarice, jealousy, desires for pretty toilettes, one or other, or all combined, have quite as much to do with their 'sacrifice' for us as anything."
"Quite true; but—there are women and women, perhaps, and it was not of that sort of regret that I spoke."