“Well—and you find him—?”
“I find him,” she repeated after him. “Shall I tell you what I find him?”
“I shall listen with delight.”
“I find him—a soul! You and I, my friend—and the rest of us—are bodies; he is a soul!”
The artist began to whistle softly as he painted.
“It is dangerous work,” he said at length, “for women to play with souls.”
“That is true,” she answered, coldly.
The same day she went again to the room on the sixth floor. She again sat through an hour of silence in which the American painted eagerly, now and then stopping to regard her with searching eyes.
“But not as the rest regard me,” she said to herself. “He forgets that it is a woman who sits here. He sees only what he would paint.”
As time went by, this fact, which she always felt, was in itself a fascination.