“I don’t know what it is, but I’d rather you used me for your Arethusa. You know,” she added wistfully, “that we began it together.”
“Right, Sweetness. And we’ll finish it together or not at all. Are you satisfied?”
She smiled, sighed, nodded. He released her lovely, childlike hands and she walked to the doorway of the summer house and looked out over the wall-bed, where tall thickets of hollyhock and blue larkspur stretched away in perspective toward a grove of trees and a little pond beyond.
His painter’s eye, already busy with the beauty of 310 her face and figure against the riot of flowers, and almost mechanically transposing both into terms of colour and value, went blind suddenly as she turned and looked at him.
And for the first time—perhaps with truer vision—he became aware of what else this young girl was besides a satisfying combination of tint and contour—this lithe young thing palpitating with life—this slender, gently breathing girl with her grey eyes meeting his so candidly—this warm young human being who belonged more truly in the living scheme of things than she did on painted canvas or in marble.
From this unexpected angle, and suddenly, he found himself viewing her for the first time—not as a plaything, not as a petted model, not as an object appealing to his charity, not as an experiment in altruism—nor sentimentally either, nor as a wistful child without a childhood.
Perhaps, to him, she had once been all of these. He looked at her with other eyes now, beginning, possibly, to realise something of the terrific responsibility he was so lightly assuming.
He got up from his bench and went over to her; and the girl turned a trifle pale with excitement and delight.
“Why did you come to me?” she asked breathlessly.
“I don’t know.”