"Are they? They have few auditors. But you are beautiful, too, in your way. Has no one ever told you so?"
"I?"
She glanced at him half wistfully, half despairingly; she thought that he spoke in derision of her.
"You," he answered. "Why not? Look at yourself here: all imperfect as it is, you can see something of what you are."
Her eyes fell for the first time on the broad confused waves of dull color, out of whose depths her own face arose, like some fair drowned thing tossed upward on a murky sea. She started with a cry as if he had wounded her, and stood still, trembling.
She had looked at her own limbs floating in the opaque water of the bathing pool, with a certain sense of their beauty wakening in her; she had tossed the soft, thick, gold-flecked darkness of her hair over her bare shoulder, with a certain languor and delight; she had held a knot of poppies against her breast, to see their hues contrast with her own white skin;—but she had never imagined that she had beauty.
He watched her, letting the vain passion he thus taught her creep with all its poison into her veins.
He had seen such wonder and such awed delight before in Nubian girls with limbs of bronze and eyes of night, who had never thought that they had loveliness,—though they had seen their forms in the clear water of the wells every time that they had brought their pitchers thither,—and who had only awakened to that sweet supreme sense of power and possession, when first they had beheld themselves live again upon his canvas.
"You are glad?" he asked her at length.
She covered her face with her hands.