Glasses | Page 9

sort of enjoyment he desired, it
wouldn't be more to the point to deal directly with the lady. He stared
and blushed at this; the idea clearly alarmed him. He was an
extraordinary case-- personally so modest that I could see it had never
occurred to him. He had fallen in love with a painted sign and seemed
content just to dream of what it stood for. He was the young prince in
the legend or the comedy who loses his heart to the miniature of the
princess beyond seas. Until I knew him better this puzzled me
much--the link was so missing between his sensibility and his type. He
was of course bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the
beholder some sense of intention and quality; but for one of them, a
comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a preference so arbitrary
and so lively that, taking no second look at the others, he expressed his
wish to possess it and fell into the extremity of confusion over the
question of price. I helped him over that stile, and he went off without
having asked me a direct question about Miss Saunt, yet with his
acquisition under his arm. His delicacy was such that he evidently
considered his rights to be limited; he had acquired none at all in regard
to the original of the picture. There were others--for I was curious about
him--that I wanted him to feel I conceded: I should have been glad of
his carrying away a sense of ground acquired for coming back. To
ensure this I had probably only to invite him, and I perfectly recall the
impulse that made me forbear. It operated suddenly from within while
he hung about the door and in spite of the diffident appeal that blinked
in his gentle grin. If he was smitten with Flora's ghost what mightn't be
the direct force of the luminary that could cast such a shadow? This
source of radiance, flooding my poor place, might very well happen to
be present the next time he should turn up. The idea was sharp within
me that there were relations and complications it was no mission of
mine to bring about. If they were to develop they should develop in

their very own sense.
Let me say at once that they did develop and that I perhaps after all had
something to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had departed without a fresh
appointment he was to reappear six months later under protection no
less powerful than that of our young lady herself. I had seen her
repeatedly for months: she had grown to regard my studio as the temple
of her beauty. This miracle was recorded and celebrated there as
nowhere else; in other places there was occasional reference to other
subjects of remark. The degree of her presumption continued to be
stupefying; there was nothing so extraordinary save the degree in which
she never paid for it. She was kept innocent, that is she was kept safe,
by her egotism, but she was helped also, though she had now put off
her mourning, by the attitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law
unto herself. It was as a lone orphan that she came and went, as a lone
orphan that she was the centre of a crush. The neglect of the Hammond
Synges gave relief to this character, and she made it worth their while
to be, as every one said, too shocking. Lord Iffield had gone to India to
shoot tigers, but he returned in time for the punctual private view: it
was he who had snapped up, as Flora called it, the gem of the
exhibition. My hope for the girl's future had slipped ignominiously off
his back, but after his purchase of the portrait I tried to cultivate a new
faith. The girl's own faith was wonderful. It couldn't however be
contagious: too great was the limit of her sense of what painters call
values. Her colours were laid on like blankets on a cold night. How
indeed could a person speak the truth who was always posturing and
bragging? She was after all vulgar enough, and by the time I had
mastered her profile and could almost with my eyes shut do it in a
single line I was decidedly tired of its "purity," which affected me at
last as inane. One moved with her, moreover, among phenomena
mismated and unrelated; nothing in her talk ever matched anything out
of it. Lord Iffield was dying of love for her, but his family was leading
him a life. His mother, horrid woman, had told some one that she
would rather he should be swallowed by a tiger than marry a girl not
absolutely one