O'Neill grunted, with his eyes on the bed. "He's had a beastly life, if that's what you mean," he said, "Who was the woman?'
"One might almost have guessed that, too," said Buscarlet. He rose.
"Come and see," he said.
There was a recess beside the great mantelpiece, and in it hung Regnault's famous picture, "The Dancer," all scarlet frock and white flesh against an amber background.
"That?" exclaimed O'Neill. "Lola?"
Buscarlet nodded; he had forced a good effect.
"That is she," he answered.
The picture was familiar to O'Neill; to him, as to many another young painter of that time, it was an upstanding landmark on the road of art. He looked at it now, in the sparse light from the bedside lamp, with a fresh interest in its significance. He saw with new understanding the conventionalism of the pose—hip thrust out, arm akimbo, shoulder cocked—contrasted against the dark vivacity of the face and all the pulsing opulence of the flesh. It was an epic, an epic of the savage triumphant against civilization, of the spirit victorious against the forms of art.
He stared at it, Buscarlet smiling mildly at his elbow; then he turned away and went back to his seat. The face on the bed was unchanged.
"So Regnault married Lola!" he said slowly. "When?"
"Ah, who knows?" Buscarlet shrugged graphically. "Many years ago, of course. It is twenty years since she danced."