“Where is the original?” he asked meaningly. “I wish to compare it with—the portrait.”
Mrs. Wilbur flushed with annoyance.
“So it is! the great red divan and the same dress and the house. I couldn’t have arranged it more expressly for you! The portrait is in here,” she turned to an inner room, designed for her den, and touched an electric knob. Erard looked at his hostess critically, while she threw herself, wilfully, into the pose.
“Not quite,” he announced, glancing at the portrait that faced them; “not the final thing. Perhaps another year or two. The stone is harder than I thought, and perhaps you have complicated the problem.”
Mrs. Wilbur refrained from pushing him to an explanation.
“And you have changed also: prosperity has altered you.”
“Yes, we take less tragedy in our portions as we go on. The pinnacle doesn’t seem quite so distinguished, nor the abyss so awful, as it did once. It is the middle light of life.”
“And your work? the painting?” she suggested eagerly.
“I paint less,” he replied uneasily. “Each season I mean to get at it again, but the penalty of success in one effort is that you are expected to repeat yourself. I am repeating myself.”
“Oh, you mustn’t do that,” she replied pleadingly, understanding that he referred to the success of his writing. She would have carried protest further, but Mrs. Anthon intervened with a tardy guest who had been hunting for her hostess.