“You remember Anne? You know how she would take praise. Adorably, like a little girl who is almost too shy to be pleased. It was absurd, of course. She was by no means young even then, remember. But somehow that only made it more piquante. Anne is one of the few women for whom age is an absurd convention. Quite meaningless, quite beside the point. The goddesses are immortal.” “But there was nothing of the goddess about her nature,” objected his friend. “Good heavens, no! Except physically. She’s a mortal woman if ever there was one. She’s just what she always was, sweet Anne Page.” Twilight was creeping into the studio. The polished floor with its costly rugs, the pictures on the walls, the outlines of cabinets and tables, all were growing dim and indistinct. The last light from the window above the men’s heads fell across the face of the portrait on the easel. It looked down upon them gently with the wavering uncertain smile in the eyes, and on the lips, red and soft as the petals of a rose. “René saw a great deal of her that summer, I suppose?” asked the Vicomte, breaking a silence. “We all did. The gods for their own inscrutable purposes had decided Anne’s fate. The old lady got weaker and insisted upon having a hospital nurse. She was in her room all day in bed, and Anne was bidden to entertain us. “When we were not in her garden, she was at the old barn which René and I had rigged up as a studio. “She amazed us all. Do you know those tightly shut buds on a rose-tree, that you think will never open? And then the sun shines, and gradually, very slowly, a little every day, they grow pinker and sweeter, till at last they are roses? “I think the sun came out for Anne that year, for the first time in her life. “We made her laugh. I don’t believe she had ever laughed before. And we discovered that she had brains, and taste and understanding, and _instinct_ for everything that fired our young brains. Instinct is the word for Anne. It’s a sixth sense with her. The only sense it’s any good for a woman to possess. The very sense that nowadays with their education and their emancipation, and their ‘rights,’ women are doing their best to kill. “And she’d read, _mon cher_. Good heavens, what she’d read! The modern English woman with her smattering of Latin and Greek, is an ill-educated prig beside her. For five years she had been shut up in a library, and I believe she had read everything worth reading in her own literature, and much of ours too, for that matter. And I, who like René am partly English by education at least, know what that means. It’s a magnificent literature for those who have ears to hear, and a heart to understand.” He began to light one of the lamps, stooping over it as he talked. “She used to read poetry to us sometimes. Thouret and Dacier knew very little English then, but they could understand the simple things when she read them. I can hear Thouret now, trying to say after her--