Loswa reflected a moment, then he answered with perfect candour:
'I have never thought of her from that day to this. I meant to have made a great picture from that little study, but I lost sight of it; I sold it.'
'You sold it to us: yes. It is there in Otho's room. I have often wondered what became of the original. Do you mean that you have never had the curiosity to inquire?'
'I really never have. She was certainly a provincial beauty, but they are not the beauties which dwell longest in my mind. I intended to make something très empoignant of that sketch, but I forgot it, once it was sold.'
'How like a modern painter!' she said with amusement, and changed the subject.
Lemberg approached and Loswa rose.
'What is your verdict on my work?' asked the composer of 'Ruth.' 'I am very nervous till you have spoken. When they are all praising me and you are mute, I think of those lines of Robert Browning's, which tell us how the musician heard all the theatre applaud, but himself looked only to the place where "Rossini sat silent in his stall."'
'If I were silent in my stall,' she replied, 'it must have been because silence seemed the fittest tribute to your exquisite pastoral. One seemed to hear the corn bend, the wind sigh, the poppies blow. For one half hour you made me in love with the country! And then the farewell to Naomi——I only wish that Gluck were alive to hear.'
She passed on to a discriminating criticism of the musical structure of the composition, with all that profound and scientific knowledge of the tonic art which were united in her to the most subtle appreciation of its phases. The 'Ruth' had charmed her ear, and her mind could distinguish why it did so.