Though the drive was long it seemed only too short to him. She scarcely spoke at all, but looked straight ahead, wistfully, as it seemed to him, as though she were watching a world of men and women in which she only was sad. He, too, was silent, content to look at her, noting every beauty of her face, the graceful carriage of her head, the evanescent loveliness of her hair.
“Here we are!” he exclaimed, as he led the way into the studio. “Shan’t I just make a nuisance of myself! You’ll have to sit still, though you can talk. I can listen while I work.”
“What a lovely room!” she said, looking round at the deep archway before the carved oak fireplace; the opposite arch, the recess with the daïs and the wide expanse of latticed windows with the clear lights above; the parqueted floor, strewn with rugs and skins; the carved chairs and the luxurious settee—the display of somber, costly, beautiful things. “What a lovely room! I couldn’t work in a room like this—but then I’ve never found a room in which I could work, since I left the country.”
She threw off her wraps and flung them with her hat—recklessly—on a couch, and then stood warming her hands at the fire.
“I don’t think you were made for working,” he said, standing close beside her, looking down upon her as she bent to the blaze, which shed a warmth of crimson over her face. “You were meant to help others to work.”
He brought over to the fireside an old-fashioned, plain wooden chair, with high, stiff back and broad, flat arms.
“There—sit there—straight up—I shan’t keep you like that for long at a stretch; grip the ends of the arms slightly—and look into the fire; look like you did, as far as you can, that afternoon when I called you the rebel.”
She took the position he directed, while he sat down on a stool at a little distance and began to sketch rapidly upon a block on his knee.
“I want to rough it out,” he said, as he tore off a sheet of the paper and flung it on the floor, “until I’ve caught the pose, and then I’ll start to get it on a canvas.”
At first he worked quickly, the while she watched him with keen interest. She knew that if she had aroused deep emotion in him, he could not continue this make-believe of absorption in his work, could not long keep up this semblance of looking upon her simply as a model.