She sat staring at him for a moment, then she laughed. She could not have told why she did it, and she was instantly sorry. The blood rushed to his face.
"I shall create that which will forever assure you that I can carve true to the most familiar form and line you know," he said fiercely.
Her face was as crimson as his now, though she felt ice cold.
"What do you mean?" she demanded, her voice unsteady.
He laughed bitterly. In his own heart a fierce volcanic surge was raging which he did not attempt to control.
"Do you think that I, trained as I am to gather fact from touch, could carry you through weeks of hell in my arms, against my breast, and not know you, you as you are, Claire Barkley? I shall carve you, you with your cold reserve suppressing the emotional chaos within you, and you will not fail to recognize yourself."
Claire gripped the chair arms. Anger, fear, doubt, then the knowledge that he could do as he said, swept over her in rapidly succeeding waves, and gathered at last into a steel hate that she felt must last through eternity.
"You, you would do that, after I guided you here! You would take advantage of what I could not help, and--and--" she choked, and then said swiftly--"so, under your indifferent exterior you used your touch that way these days! Oh, you--you beast!"
Lawrence laughed coolly. "I could no more help it than I can avoid being here."
"Lies!" she exclaimed. "A gentleman could help it!"
"And what of beauty, of your boasted purity of art, is there in that?"
"All," he said calmly. "If you knew, oh, if I could make you see what every artist knows"--he was talking passionately now, his face illumined in spite of his blind eyes--"you would realize, that I could not help it, that I glory in it, and that it was and is the way of art."
He rose and walked the floor, pouring out his creed in a stream of burning words. "I am a machine, a sensitive thing that registers what it feels and knows, that is all. You touch me, my brain registers that touch, and something in me, the will to live, the desire to create, the insistent shout for expression says, 'Take that and carve it in stone.' If I could see, if I were not blind, I would have been a painter. I would have painted you, almost naked as you were, your eyes filled with the hunger for life, your face tense with racing thoughts, I would have painted you fully, all of you, as you were in night-gown and skirt there in that forest, and you would have shouted to all the world from my canvas, 'Look at me, I am the primitive, the wild, the passionate, the tender, the selfish and unselfish living woman. See me as I am, cultured, refined, educated, elemental withal, and the emblem of humanity as it is, still stained with the traditional mud of superstition and blood that marks its origin. Oh, I would have painted you so, and now I shall carve you so!"