“Do you want me to sit for you again?”
“Oh, would you? Now?”
He glanced at the church clock. “I've forty-seven minutes,” he said.
Much may be accomplished in forty-seven minutes. In the studio she sprang to her work with a sort of contained fury. And as the eager, intent eyes regarded him with an ever-increasing impersonality, a pain was born in his heart and grew and burned, because to this woman who had clung to him in the abandonment of mortal weakness but an hour before, whose pulses had leaped and fluttered for his peril, he had become only a subject for exploitation, something to further her talent, wax to her deft hand.
Perhaps he had been that since the first. Well, what right had he to expect anything more?
Nothing of this reached the absorbed worker. She was intent upon her model's mouth and chin, whereon she had caught the sense of significant changes. Had she but once come forth from her absorption to see and interpret the man's eyes, she might have known. For only in the eyes does a brave man's suffering show; the rest of his face he may control beyond betrayal. Something happily restrained her from offering payment as usual, when she finally threw the cloth over the unfinished sketch.
“You spoke of dogs not liking your clothes,” she said lightly. “Do you always sleep in them?”
“Oh, no. They sleep on the floor at the foot of my bed and keep watch. May I have them pressed?”
“It would be an interesting change. But why ask my permission?”
“Because you told me once to come as is.'”