“Tell me about this one,” she said without looking at him. She divined that it was very near his heart.
In the foreground amid laughing woodland crouched a faun with little furry ears and stumps of horns, and he was staring in piteous terror at a vision; and the vision was that of a shivering, outcast woman on a wet pavement in a sordid street.
“It is the joyous, elemental creature's first conception of pain,” said Jimmie, after a few moments' silence. “You see, life has been to him only the sunshine, and the earth drenched with colour and music—as the earth ought to be—and now he sees a world that is coming grey with rain and misty with tears, and he has the horror of it in his eyes. I am not given to such moralising in paint,” he added with a smile. “This is a very early picture.” He looked at it for some time with eyes growing wistful. “Yes,” he sighed, “I did it many years ago.”
“It has a history then?”
“Yes,” he admitted; and he remembered how the outcast figure in the rain had symbolised that little funeral procession in Paris and how terribly grey the world had been.
Norma's chastened mood had not awed the spirit of mockery within her, but had rendered it less bitter, and had softened her voice. She waved her hand towards the crouching faun.
“And that is you?” she asked.
Jimmie caught a kind raillery in her glance, and laughed. Yes, she had his secret; was the only person who had ever guessed him beneath the travesty of horns and goat's feet.
“I like you for laughing,” she said.
“Why?”