He pointed at the picture as he spoke. His keen eyes, half shut, were fixed upon it.
“That is the real man, and what you see is only the appearance he chooses to give of himself.”
“How do you know? How can you know that?”
“Haven’t I the power to show men and women as in essence they are?”
His eyes travelled round the big studio slowly, travelled from canvas to canvas, from the battered old siren of the streets to the girl who was dreaming of sins not yet committed; from Cora waiting for her prey to the judge who had condemned his.
“Haven’t I? And don’t you know it?”
“You are wrong this time,” she said with mutinous determination, but still with the tears in her eyes. “You couldn’t sum up Arabian. You tried and tried again. And now at last you have forced yourself to paint him. You have got angry. That’s it. You have got furious with yourself and with him, because of your own impotence, and you have painted him in a passion.”
“Oh, no!”
He shook his head.
“I never felt colder, more completely master of myself and my passions, than when I painted that portrait.”