“There’s that girl across the way,” he said, aloud, as though making the discovery for the first time.
Sunshine now lay in dazzling white patches across his drawing. He blinked, washed another brush, and leaned back in his chair again, looking across at his neighbor. Youth is in itself attractive; and she was young—a white-skinned, dark-eyed girl, a trifle colorless, perhaps, like a healthy plant needing the sun.
“They grow like that in this town,” he reflected, drumming idly on the table with his pencil. “Who is she? I’ve seen her there for months, and I don’t know.”
The girl raised her dark eyes and gave him a serene stare.
“Oh yes,” he muttered, “I see your eyes, but they tell me nothing about you. You’re all alike when you look at us out of the windows called eyes. What’s behind those eyes? Nobody knows. Nobody knows.”
He dropped his hand on the table and began tracing arabesques with his pencil-point. Then his capricious fancy blossomed into a sketch of his neighbor—a rapid idealization, which first amused, then enthralled him.
And while his pencil flew he murmured lazily to himself: “You don’t know what I’m doing, do you? I wonder what you’d do if you did know?… Thank you, ma belle, for sitting so still. Won’t you smile a little? No?… Who are you? What are you?—with your dimpled white hands framing your face.… I had no idea you were half so lovely! … or is it my fancy and my pencil which endow you with qualities that you do not possess?… There! you moved. Don’t let it occur again.”…
He passed a soft eraser over the sketch, dimming its outline; picked out a brush and began in color, rambling on in easy, listless self-communion: “I’ve asked you who you are and you haven’t told me. Pas chic, ça. There are thousands and thousands of dark-eyed little things like you in this city. Did you ever see the streets when the shops close? There are thousands and thousands like you in the throng;—some poor, some poorer; some good, some better; some young, some younger; all trotting across the world on eager feet. Where? Nobody knows. Why? Nobody knows. Heigh-ho! Your portrait is done, little neighbor.”
He hovered over the delicate sketch, silent a moment, under the spell of his own work. “If you were like this, a man might fall in love with you,” he muttered, raising his eyes.
The development of ideas is always remarkable, particularly on a sunny day in spring-time. Sunshine, blue sky, and the perfume of the wistaria were too much for Tennant.