'They are only in a pastoral,' she said with a smile. 'They are very well there. We are not required to share them. You would share them, perhaps; nobody else would.'
'You mean I should share those of Boaz!'
'Boaz or any other vrai berger. You should inhabit one of the happy valleys of Florian and Mademoiselle Scudéry. There is always something in your ideas which is quite of the last century, and seems to suggest a flock of sheep with ribbons and a crook, like those in the Saxes statuettes. If I were to die, you would like to lie on a bank of violets and mourn me in alexandrines.'
He smiled, but the raillery was not welcome to him. It seemed to him that, if she had any love for him, she would never laugh at him, never see in him that weaker, absurder side, which may be found in every human character if eyes without sympathy look for it. And the imputation of sentimentality irritated him as it irritates all those whose feelings are strong and whose temperament is incapable of any affectation or of any shallowness.
Let a man have as little vanity as he may, yet in his secret heart he likes the woman he loves to find him a little more than man. He had been long conscious that he would for ever look in vain for this kind of admiration from her. There was a certain depreciation even in her indulgence; there was an invariable criticism in her mental attitude, however favourable; she could be no more deceived as to the weaknesses of character than a great surgeon can be as to the weaknesses of body. True, her wit and her intellect served to retain her power over him, but then he was nervously sensible that these made him less in her eyes than he would willingly have been. He was aware that the very fineness of her penetration, the very brilliancy of her mind, made her infinitely more hard to please for any length of time than women of smaller brain and of less highly-trained powers. To a woman of rare intellect and of critical wit it is difficult for any man to remain long a hero.
'Our minds are all finite, alas! and you want the infinite,' he said once to her with some petulance, conscious that his own mind did not content hers any more than any other man's.
She assented.
'I have no doubt it was always the same everywhere,' she conceded. 'Probably Marcus Aurelius was very dull and fussy if one knew the truth; and I dare say even Horace is livelier on paper than he was in person!'
As she spoke now, her eyes had wandered at the paintings which were hung on the wall behind him. He saw that they rested on Loswa's sketch. He took the occasion which seemed to present itself.
'Have you ever thought of her?' he asked, turning to look himself at the portrait.