“No! No!” She was impatient at my interruption. “He has a way of ‘merely looking’.” He must have realized that in truth she was not at the moment thinking of him as a being: he was an accident, of the weather, of the fading daylight, of the world which persisted in stinging her. But the unfortunate creature was a man, and he forced her face back and bent to kiss her. “That--for--your--work!” it seems he said; she was not clear about it, but she insisted that he said something banal. She preserved the rigidity of her frozen face when she leapt to her feet. And this cold face, this pair of eyes that conveyed no hint of her ever having loved him, brought him to a cool judgment of her attitude. He said: “So! That’s the way it is!” She said that she was aware of her face shattering into agony. She began speaking very rapidly. “You don’t deal in words. You can always return--at once--to your work. You can pick up that piece of chalk and go back to your lines. But the word--the right word--it’s always dodging us; it’s always out of our reach; it’s the elusive essence of art. My God!” she told me that she broke off with; “everything intrudes!” She told me that he was a Dutchman, through and through. “He can’t possibly fly off his head. He glares. He asked me what I wanted, anyway? Did I want him to sit in the hall, like a lackey--he would say that; his mother would have said it--not to speak, not to move, not to--exist, by Jove!--unless I pressed a button? He wound up by remarking that I was asking a good deal of him.”