“Yes.”
“But why on earth should you do such a thing for me?”
She found no words to explain why.
“Nonsense,” he continued; “you’re a business woman now. Your father will have to find somebody to cook for him and take the desk when he’s out at Grogan’s. Don’t worry; I’ll fix it with him.... By the way, Dulcie, supposing you sit down.”
She found a chair and took the Prophet onto her lap.
“Now, this will be very convenient for me,” he went on, inspecting her with increasing satisfaction. “If I ever have any orders—any sitters—you can have a vacation, of course. Otherwise, I’ll always have an interesting model at hand—I’ve got chests full of wonderful costumes—genuine ones——” He fell silent, his eyes studying her. Already he was planning half a dozen pictures, for he was just beginning to perceive how adaptable the girl might be. And there was about her that indefinable something which, when a painter discovers it, interests him and arouses his intense artistic curiosity.
“You know,” he said musingly, “you are something more than pretty, Dulcie.... I could put you in eighteenth century clothes and you’d look logical. Yes, and in seventeenth century clothes, too.... I could do some amusing things with you in oriental garments.... A young Herodiade ... Calypso ... Theodora.... She was a child, too, you know. There’s a portrait with bobbed hair—a young girl by Van Dyck.... You know you are quite stimulating to me, Dulcie. You excite a painter’s imagination. 100 It’s rather odd,” he added naïvely, “that I never discovered you before; and I’ve known you over two years.”
He had seated himself on the sofa while discoursing. Now he got up, touched a bell twice. The Finnish maid, Selinda, with her high cheek-bones, frosty blue eyes and colourless hair, appeared in cap and apron.
“Selinda,” he said, “take Miss Dulcie into my room. In a long, leather Turkish box on the third shelf of my clothes closet is a silk and gold costume and a lot of jade jewelry. Please put her into it.”
So Dulcie Soane went away with her cat in her arms, beside the neat and frosty-eyed Selinda; and Barres opened a portfolio of engravings, where were gathered the lovely aristocrats of Van Dyck and Rubens and Gainsborough and his contemporaries—a charmingly mixed company, separated by centuries and frontiers, yet all characterised by a common something—some inexplicable similarity which Barres recognised without defining.