He chose his background well; a sheltered spot in a fold of hill just beyond the town, where a slim young oak sapling still retained its copper-hued autumn leaves, that seemed almost fiery against the deep, soft blue of the sky. He had conceived of her as standing under the oak-tree, so that, to him, working lower down on the slope she too showed against the sky, seemingly caught in a network of delicate boughs. Being below her he was also the richer by the soft, three-cornered shadow under her chin, and the whole of her became a tone of exquisite delicacy, as of shadowed ivory, in the setting of sky--that sky of southern spring which seems literally drenched in light. The tawny note of the oak-leaves was to be repeated in some sheep, which, though kept subservient to the figure of Désirée, were to supply the motive of the picture--or so Archie thought till the sudden freak that made him introduce the fauns.
Désirée was all for robing herself in her best--a black silk bodice with a high collar, and a be-trained, jet-spangled skirt, but Archie coaxed her into wearing the dress he first saw her in; a mere wrapper of indefinite prune colour, belted in at the waist to show the lines of her deep chested, long flanked figure, and cut so low as to leave her throat bare from the pit of it. Her sleeves were rolled back to the elbow and her arms showed milk-white as far as the reddened wrists and the big, work-roughened hands that held a hazel switch across her thighs.
Archie was Anglo-Saxon enough to feel a slight stiffness at the first sitting, but Désirée was a stranger to the sensation of tied tongue.
"I like the English," she announced. "Not many of them come here, but I have not spent my life in Draginoules, no, indeed! I was in a laundry once at La Madeleine. Do you know it? It is where they take in the washing of Nice. So I used to go much into Nice, and an English lady there painted me. She had a talent! She made me look beautiful. In Draginoules, do you know what they call me? They call me _l'Anglaise manquée_!"
"Because you like the English so?" asked Archie. His French was considerably purer than hers, she spoke it with the Provençal accent that sounds exactly like a Cockney twang.