“It asks to be sketched, doesn’t it?” Léon observed. “And now you will have to be very definite, Mademoiselle. It won’t do for you to suppose that you can judge of the Campagna without a glance, as if it were merely a new masculine acquaintance!”
He opened her camp-stool and gravely placed himself on an old wall behind her. “Vous y êtes,” he asserted, “begin!”
But Rose didn’t begin. She had been thinking of what he had asked her. Perhaps she hadn’t been quite frank. The Pinsents as a family thought it a sin not to be quite frank.
“I was thinking about you,” she admitted. “I mean myself; I thought--I thought you weren’t at all like an Englishman!”
Léon laughed gently. “What a discovery,” he said. “I am not like an Englishman--I! And did you want me to be? You are disappointed, perhaps?”
The wonderful pink color deepened in her face. “No,” she said, “I am not a bit disappointed--I like people to be different.”
“Thank you, Mademoiselle,” he said with sudden gravity. “You relieve me very much, for that is one thing I could not change for you--I could not be less a Frenchman.”
Still she did not begin her sketch. “You are tired?” he asked her. “Rest then, and don’t trouble to make a picture on that little strip of canvas. Nothing you can do there will, I assure you, be half as successful as what you are doing, by just sitting where you are.”
She was sure he was flirting now, but what she wasn’t sure was how to stop it. She wondered if Edith or Agatha knew, but it flashed across her in a terrible moment of disloyalty that perhaps neither of them had ever been put to the proof. “I don’t think you ought to say that kind of thing--” she said a little uncomfortably.
“But why not?” Léon urged. “Why do you not wish me to take pleasure in your beauty? And if I take it, would it not be rude and ungracious not to express it? For my part I believe only in the truth. If it is agreeable--good! Let us enjoy it. If it is disagreeable, let us bear it. But why should we try to avoid it? Besides we can never avoid it. If we choose to shut our eyes to the truth it will take us by surprise. Is that the way you like to be taken, Mademoiselle?”