Serena smiled and held out his hand, which the Frenchman took rapturously, and raised it to his lips.
‘Ah, Monsieur,’ he exclaimed, ‘this is the proudest moment of my life!’
Ponto threw himself into a chair, and looked around him with a smile of feline insipidity.
‘What’s that you have there, my dear Serena?’ he asked, blinking at the picture. ‘Ah, I see, another superbly musical meditation in the minor key of flake white!’
‘It is a portrait,’ said Serena, quietly.
‘An ideal portrait—quite so. How wonderfully in that floating drapery you have conveyed the serene insouciance of trances of languor crescending into aberration of supersensual dream!’
‘It is neither more nor less than a careful likeness of the original,’ returned Serena, modestly. ‘In the arrangement of the colours I wish to convey——’
‘The spirituality of a superb and life-consuming dream, fired with the arid flame of incipient passion—ethereal, almost epicene—conscious of throbbing vistas of asexual retrospection and chromatic wastes of fruitless future fantasy, interspersed with forlorn gulfs of irremediable darkness and despair. Added to this, and seen in the pose of the limp hand and the melancholy texture of the flesh tints, is the Lethean consciousness of a drowned and devastated ideal, unlightened by one star of promise and irredeemed by one flower of celestial ruth. Am I right? Do I take your meaning?’
‘Just so,’ said Serena, dryly, and turned to look at the Frenchman.
The latter, with shoulders elevated, and pince-nez in position, was gazing eagerly at the portrait. He now turned with a bow to Serena.