“No, nowhere. I like to feel the snow falling on me.”
“Were you born here, Cecilia?”
“No, I was born out there—we lived there then.” She stared into the distance, with raised eyebrows, and her tone gave us the impression that “out there” was some great, dark teeming city on the other side of the ocean, that it was deep with black memories, painfully intriguing to the thought. “But I’ve been here a long while,” she concluded.
She was so pretty with her reticent, dark manner; and her brief answers waked a trembling echo within one, like the commonplace but meaningful words in a dream. One could have sat there a long while asking questions at random and could have listened long.
But Leo grew impatient. He burned with zeal to get at his drawing, for that was why he had taken up with the girl, and he was not to be put off. He trusted in his art, did Leo; he was wont to talk of distilling the quintessence out of a physiognomy—and now he wished to do it with this subject. Just a few strokes and he would have it all in a concentrated effect: the tranquillity of chin and eyebrows, the falling line of the neck—the girl’s whole content should be noted there; but if so there must be no distraction, no emotions and associated thoughts to make one’s glance stray.
“Let her alone with your prattle,” he said; “she’s prettier when she is quiet.” And his eyes glanced with restless penetration, as if he was afraid of losing something, while he and the others chose their places.
She sat motionless; the whole proceeding appeared to be entirely indifferent to her and she continued to hold her wrists crossed and to gaze in front of her without seeing.
But we who did not draw felt that the silence was oppressive. Was not this unfair to her, was it not wrong to keep her there as a mere thing to be measured? Was not every glint of her eye, every ring in her voice worth more than all these lines? Was it not presumptuous to attempt to translate the changing deeps of life into the language of the deaf and dumb? What did she hide in the vault of her brain?—what was this girl that sat there?
The sketchers sweated and screwed up their eyes to make them sharp. They held up their hands against the light—they seemed to have a harder task than they had realized—and the girl slowly drooped her eyelashes.
With that we broke in, “You’re tired perhaps, Cecilia? It’s getting on toward bedtime.”