As she had once looked on himself, so he now looked on her.
But in him there arose little curiosity and still less pity; he recognized her as the girl whom, with a face of old Egypt, he had seen rowing her boat-load of corn down the river, and whom he had noticed for her strange unlikeness to all around her.
He supposed that mere curiosity had brought her there, and sleep overtaken her in the drowsiness of the first heat of the budding year.
He did not seek to rouse her, nor to spare her any shame or pain which, at her waking, she might feel. He merely saw in her a barbaric yet beautiful creature; and his only desire was to use the strange charms in her for his art.
A smooth-planed panel stood on an easel near; turning it where best the light fell, he began to sketch her attitude, rapidly, in black and white. It was quickly done by a hand so long accustomed to make such transcripts; and he soon went further, to that richer portraiture which color alone can accomplish. The gray stone pavement; the brown and slender limbs; the breadth of scarlet given by the sash about her loins; the upturned face, whose bloom was as brilliant as that of a red carnation blooming in the twilight of some old wooden gallery; the eyelids, tear-laden still; the mouth that smiled and sighed in dreaming; while on the wall above, the radiant figure of the young god remained in full sunlight whilst all beneath was dark;—these gave a picture which required no correction from knowledge, no addition from art.
He worked on for more than an hour, until the wood began to beam with something of the hues of flesh and blood, and the whole head was thrown out in color, although the body and the limbs still remained in their mere outline.
Once or twice she moved restlessly, and muttered a little, dully, as though the perpetual unsparing gaze, bent on her with a scrutiny so cold and yet so searching, disturbed or magnetized her even in her sleep. But she never awakened, and he had time to study and to trace out every curve and line of the half-developed loveliness before him with as little pity, with as cruel exactitude, as that with which the vivisector tears asunder the living animal whose sinews he severs, or the botanist plucks to pieces the new-born flower whose structure he desires to examine.
The most beautiful women, who had bared their charms that he might see them live again upon his canvas, had seldom had power to make his hand tremble a moment in such translation.
To the surgeon all sex is dead, all charm is gone, from the female corpse that his knife ravages in search of the secrets of science; and to Arslàn the women whom he modeled and portrayed were nearly as sexless, nearly as powerless to create passion or emotion. They were the tools for his art: no more.
When, in the isolation of the long northern winters, he had sat beside the pine-wood that blazed on his hearth while the wolves howled down the deserted village street, and the snow drifted up and blocked from sight the last pane of the lattice and the last glimpse of the outer world, he had been more enamored of the visions which visited him in that solitude than he had ever been since of the living creatures whose beauty he had recorded in his works.