She laughed. "Yes, I don't like translations at all. Ever since I saw that Byron had translated Catullus' Ode to Juventus as an Ode to 'Eleanor' I have fled from all of them."
"You seem to be tremendously clever!"
"Am I?" she asked, smiling up at him. "I am so glad you think so. I am very fond of learning and all the arts. Are you? Painting, music, poetry, sculpture. They are the soul of life, I think. What should we do without them? Think if we had only in life the Church, dusters and the poor!"
Everest laughed, and so did she. "It does sound an awful combination! Yes, I think with you art is the one thing that brings a little heaven on earth. It is the only true religion, the only true elevator of that poor wretch—man. I am never so happy, and I never feel so good and so charitable, as when I am painting."
"Do you paint?" asked Regina, with a fiery interest in her glowing eyes. "So do I. What are your subjects, and what do you paint in?—water colours or oil?"
"Oils. I do anything that catches my fancy—a head, a figure, a landscape, anything that is a little unusual. I hate the commonplace."
"In Africa I suppose you found so many subjects that were unusual: tropical trees and wonderful plants and beautiful black women."
Everest looked back at the delicately coloured face, of which her interest and excitement made the skin glow more transparently every minute.
"You have great intuition to feel that the women are beautiful," he answered; "most people just group them all together under the name of blacks, and are so blind mentally and physically as not to be able to see their beauty. There is a race in the Soudan, of which the beauty could not be surpassed. The colour is coal-black, but form and line are perfect, both in face and body. Then another race has absolutely perfect forms, though the face is of the negro type. Never anywhere else could one see more gloriously modelled shoulders and arms than those women have."