'Oh, I do not mind; only this gown is very shabby and old. I am grown too big for it. I am always growing. Monsignor says that if I grew in grace as I do in centimètres I should soon be a saint like our St. Veronica.'
'It is not for me to disparage the saints,' said Loswa, 'but I think you will have another mission in this life than to be of their community. Keep still a little while; I will not detain you long. So!—that is just right. I wish I were Raffaelle and Leonardo in one, to be worthier of the occasion.'
'Who are they?' said Damaris, as he set his folding easel straight before him and began to sketch in the flowerlike figure on the wall, fresh and wholesome as the sea-lavender that grew in the sand below. He who was all his life in a hothouse recognised the value and fragrance of that sea-born plant, though it was too homely and simple for him; recognised it with his mind, though not with his soul.
The girl knew nothing of all that made up the world to him; the names most common to him in modern literature and art were to her dead letters that said nothing; the allusions familiar to him would have been to her phrases without meaning; all that constitutes modern culture was to her as an unknown country, and the only whisper she had ever heard of all that poets and artists tell the world was what she had felt rather than understood of the read and re-read pages of 'Athalie,' and of 'Attila,' of 'Cinna,' and of 'Sintram.' Yet there was a certain richness, as of virgin soil, in that absolute freedom from conventional education, and from received ideas; she expressed herself with simplicity and vigour, and this unworn, untrained mind, only nurtured on the high thoughts of great poets, had escaped all the bondage of tradition and of secondhand knowledge, and remained what it had been made by nature.
It required a higher intelligence than Loswa's was wholly to appreciate this charm; he was too conventional to be greatly attracted by unconventional things; he was too used to all the artificial attractions of artificial women, and too artificial himself to enjoy and admire all this freshness of fancy. It would have needed a poet to have done so, and he had nothing of the poet in him. But he was enough of a student of human nature to understand that with which he scarcely sympathised, and she was so handsome that her physical beauty created in him a compassion for the solitude in which it dwelt, such compassion as her intellectual solitude, and her half-unconscious longing for wider worlds than her own, would have failed to awaken.
'Is it possible that all that is to go to a gros bourgeois who builds boats?' he thought, as he looked at the beautiful lines of her features and her form, and that fairness of her skin just warmed by sun and air into the bloom as of a peach, which he strove in vain to reproduce to his own satisfaction in his drawing. A face that would turn all Paris after it like sunflowers after the sun, to be left to pass from the glow of youth to the greyness of age on a little island in mid-sea! It seemed impossible—it would become impossible if she once learned her own charms.
'Your isle is worthy of Paul and Virginia,' he said to her, speaking to her in the phrase that she could understand, for she knew every line of Bernardin de St. Pierre. 'But where is Paul? Is there no Paul?'
'No, there is nobody at all like Paul,' she answered, with a little laugh at the idea. 'The youngest man is Raphael, and he has a fat wife and five children. They live down on the other side of the cliffs.'
'But Paul will come,' said Loswa. 'He always comes. Would you let me substitute myself for him?' he added with that somewhat impertinent audacity which had made his success so great amongst women of the world.