“If Arabian does come to-day go away with him when he goes. Get to know him really. You could, I believe. But ever since he’s come here to sit he has shut up the box which contains the truth of what he is, locked it, and lost the key. His face is a mask, and I don’t paint masks.”
“Good!” said Garstin sonorously, and looking suddenly much less tired and morose.
“But why do you think _I_ could get to know him?”
“Because he’s--but you know why better than I do.”
“Arabian’s in love with you, my girl. By Jove! There he is!”
With a swift movement Garstin got hold of a palette knife, sprang at the sketch of Arabian, and ripped up the canvas from top to bottom. Miss Van Tuyn uttered a cry.
“We’ll do better than that by a long way.”
“Stick to your word, my girl, and I’ll paint you yet--and not an Academy portrait. But you’ve got to _live_. Just now, with your cheeks all in patches you looked stunning.”
Lady Sellingworth was afraid. In spite of her many triumphs in the past she had a deep distrust of life. Since the tragedies of her middle age her curious natural diffidence, which the habit of the world had never been able to subdue, had increased. In ten years of retirement, in the hundreds of hours of solitude which those ten years had held for her, it had grown within her. And now it began to torment her.
Life brings gifts to almost everyone, and often the gift-bearer’s approach is absolutely unexpected. So it had been in Lady Sellingworth’s case. She had had no premonition that a change was preparing for her. Nothing had warned her to be on the alert when young feet turned into Berkeley Square on a certain Sunday in autumn and made towards her door. Abruptly, after years of neglect, it seemed as if life suddenly remembered that there was a middle-aged woman, with lungs which still mechanically did their work, and a heart which still obstinately persisted in beating, living in Berkeley Square, and that scarcely a bare bone had been thrown to her for some thousands of days. And then life brought her Craven, with an unusual nature, with a surely romantic mind, with a chivalrous sense that was out of the fashion, with faculties making for friendship; life offered, or seemed to offer her Craven, to whisper in her ear, “You have been starving alone for a long time. To tell the truth, I had forgotten all about you. I did not remember you were there. I don’t quite know why you persist in being there. But, as you do, and as you are wearing thin for want of sustenance, here is something for you!”