She threw up her chin in one of her bewitching ways and laughed. "I wouldn't be too simple," she returned. She looked at him with the light of her laughter still in her eyes, and went on: "I know I must be difficult —tremendously difficult; because I, whom you see as an individual, am so many people. Phases of character have an attraction for me—I wear one to-day and another to-morrow. It is very flippant, but you see I am honest about it. And it must make me difficult to paint, for it can be only by accident that I am the same person twice."
Without answering Kendal made two or three rapid strokes. "That's better," he said, as if to himself. "Go on talking, please. What did you say?"
"It doesn't seem to matter much," she answered, with a little pout. "I said 'Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?'"
"No, you didn't," returned Kendal as they laughed together. "You said something about being like Cleopatra, a creature of infinite variety, didn't you? About having a great many disguises—" absently. "But—"
Kendal fell into the absorbed silence of his work again, leaving the sentence unfinished. He looked up at her with a long, close, almost intimate scrutiny, under which and his careless words she blushed hotly.
"Then I hope you have chosen my most becoming disguise," she cried imperiously, jumping up. "Now, if you please, I will see."
She stood beside the canvas with her eyes upon his face, waiting for a sign from him. He, feeling, without knowing definitely why, that a critical moment had come between them, rose and stepped back a pace or two, involuntarily pulling himself together to meet what she might say. "Yes, you may look," he said, seeing that she would not turn her head without his word; and waited.
Elfrida took three or four steps beyond the easel and faced it. In the first instant of her gaze her face grew radiant. "Ah," she said softly, "how unconscionably you must hare flattered me! I can't be so pretty as that."
A look of relief shot across Kendal's face. "I'm glad you like it," he said briefly. "It's a capital pose."
The first thing that could possibly be observed, about the portrait was its almost dramatic loveliness. The head was turned a little, and the eyes regarded something distant, with a half wishful, half deprecating dreaminess. The lips were plaintively courageous, and the line of the lifted chin and throat helped the pathetic eyes and annihilated the heaviness of the other features. It was as if the face made an expressive effort to subdue a vitality which might otherwise have been aggressive; but while the full value of this effect of spiritual pose was caught and rendered, Kendal had done his work in a vibrant significant chord of color that strove for the personal force beneath it and brought it out.