Florimel asked why
he had left it so long unfinished, for the dust was thick on the
back of the canvas.
"Because I have never seen the face or figure," the painter answered,
"either in eye of mind or of body, that claimed the position."
As he spoke, his eyes seemed to Florimel to lighten strangely, and
as if by common consent they turned away, and looked at something
else. Presently Mrs Barnardiston, who cared more for sound than
form or colour, because she could herself sing a little, began to
glance over some music on the piano, curious to find what the young
man had been singing, whereupon Lenorme said to Florimel hurriedly,
and almost in a whisper, with a sort of hesitating assurance,
"If you would give me a sitting or two--I know I am presumptuous,
but if you would--I--I should send the picture to the Academy
in a week."
"I will," replied Florimel, flushing like a wild poppy, and as she
said it, she looked up in his face and smiled.
"It would have been selfish," she said to herself as they drove
away, "to refuse him."
This first interview, and all the interviews that had followed, now
passed through her mind as she lay awake in the darkness preceding
the dawn, and she reviewed them not without self reproach. But
for some of my readers it will be hard to believe that one of the
feelings that now tormented the girl was a sense of lowered dignity
because of the relation in which she stood to the painter--seeing
there was little or no ground for moral compunction, and the feeling
had its root merely in the fact that he was a painter fellow, and
she a marchioness.
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