“All rather badly,” she sighed, turning her head languidly and looking away. In her sketch-book she had put all of her best drawings; there were sketches of nude women, dancers, torsos, bits of running figures, sad, heavy, sensuous heads and necks of sleeping girls, chins up, eyelids down, studies of her brothers and sister, and of her father and mother.
“Delightful!” exclaimed Cowperwood, keenly alive to a new treasure. Good heavens, where had been his eyes all this while? Here was a jewel lying at his doorstep—innocent, untarnished—a real jewel. These drawings suggested a fire of perception, smoldering and somber, which thrilled him.
“These are beautiful to me, Stephanie,” he said, simply, a strange, uncertain feeling of real affection creeping over him. The man’s greatest love was for art. It was hypnotic to him. “Did you ever study art?” he asked.
“No.”
“And you never studied acting?”
“No.”
She shook her head in a slow, sad, enticing way. The black hair concealing her ears moved him strangely.
“I know the art of your stage work is real, and you have a natural art which I just seem to see. What has been the matter with me, anyhow?”
“Oh no,” she sighed. “It seems to me that I merely play at everything. I could cry sometimes when I think how I go on.”
“At twenty?”