An obscure instinct drove her into intimacy with Craven because of Arabian. She was not sure that she wanted Craven just now, but she might want him, perhaps very much, later. She knew he was not really in love with her, but they were beginning to get on well together. He admired her; she held out a hand to his youth. There was something of comradeship in their association. And their minds understood each other rather well, she thought. For they were both genuinely interested in the arts, though neither of them was an artist. And she felt very safe with Alick Craven. So she forgave Craven for his behaviour with Adela Sellingworth. She let him off his punishment. She relied upon him as her friend. And she needed to rely upon someone. For the calm self-possession of her nature was beginning to be seriously affected. She was losing some of her hitherto immense self-assurance. Her faith in the coolness and dominating strength of her own temperament was shaken.
Arabian troubled her increasingly.
That night at the restaurant in Conduit Street she had felt that she hated him, and when she had left Garstin she had realized something, that the measure of her nervous hatred was the measure of something else. Why should she mind what Arabian did? What was his way of life to her? Other men could do what they chose and her well-poised, well-disciplined brain retained its normal calm. So long as they gave her the admiration which her vanity needed, she was not persecuted by any undue anxieties about the secret conduct of their lives. But she was tormented by the memory of that girl in the restaurant. And she remembered the conversation about jealousy round the dinner table at the Carlton. She was jealous now. That was why she had been so angry with Garstin. That was why she had lain awake that night.
And yet the next morning she had gone to the studio in Glebe Place. She had greeted Arabian as usual. She had never let him know that she had seen him in the restaurant, and she had persuaded Dick Garstin to say nothing about it. No doubt Arabian supposed that he had been too quick for them, and that they did not know he was with the woman who had come in and had almost immediately gone out.
But since that night Miss Van Tuyn had been persecuted by a secret jealousy such as she had never known till now.
Let him sink back to the depths! She had said that, but she did not want him to disappear out of her life. She had said, too, that he was horrible. The words were spoken in a moment of intense nervous irritation. But were they true? She thought of him as a night bird. Yet she brought him to Claridge’s and introduced him to Fanny, and sought Fanny’s opinion of him, and been pleased that it was favourable. And she saw him almost daily. And she knew she would go on seeing him till—what?
She could not foresee the end of this adventure brought about by her own audacious wilfulness. Some day she supposed Dick Garstin would be satisfied with his work. A successful portrait of Arabian would stand on the easel in Glebe Place. Garstin was not at all satisfied yet. She knew that. He had put aside two more beginnings angrily, had started again, had paused, taken up other work, taken a rest, sent for Arabian once more. But this strange impotence of Garstin to satisfy himself would surely not last for ever. Either he would succeed, or he would abandon the attempt to succeed, or—a third possibility presented itself to Miss Van Tuyn’s mind—his model would get tired of the conflict and refuse to “sit” any more.
And then—the depths?
Till now Arabian’s patience had been remarkable. Evidently Garstin’s obstinacy was matched by an obstinacy in him. Although he had once perhaps been secretly reluctant to sit, had been tempted to become Garstin’s model by the promise of the finished picture, he now seemed determined to do his part, endured Garstin’s irritability, dissatisfaction, abandoned and renewed attempts to “make a first-rate job of him” with remarkable good temper. He was evidently resolved not to give up this enterprise without his reward. There was fixed purpose in his patience.
“By God he’s a stayer!” Garstin had said of him in a puffing breath one day when the palette knife had been angrily used once more. “Either he’s waiting for the money value of a portrait by me like a cat for a mouse, or he’s afraid of the finish.”