This was her frame of mind now, as she looked through the patterns with Bertie, while Frank sat chatting with her father. There was the man she loved, here her brother-friend. This was all good; she never could wish for anything more than to be thus happy in her love and her friendship. She looked at Bertie with a protecting and pitying smile, and yet with a touch of contempt at his slight, boyish figure, his white hands and diamond ring, his little feet in patent leather shoes, hardly larger than her own; what a dapper little mannikin he was! Always spotlessly precise in dress and manner, with an appealing cloud of melancholy over his whole person. As he glanced up at her, consulting her about some detail in one of the prints, Bertie detected this smile on Eva's face, ironically patronising and at the same time kind and sisterly; and knowing that she liked him, he could to some extent read its meaning; but he asked her: "What are you smiling at?" "At nothing," said she; and she went on, still smiling affectionately: "Why did you never become an artist, Bertie?" "An artist?" said Van Maeren, "what next?" "A painter, or an author. You have great artistic taste--" "I!" he repeated, much surprised, for he really did not know that he possessed very remarkable esthetic feeling, an exquisiteness of taste worthy of a woman, of a connoisseur; and her words set his own character before him in a new light. Does a man never know himself and what really lies in him? "I could do nothing," he replied, somewhat flattered by Eva's speech; and in his astonishment, candid for once in spite of himself, he went on: "I should be too lazy." He was startled by his own words, as though he had stripped himself bare; and he instinctively looked across at Frank to see if he had heard him. Vexed at his own thoughtlessness he coloured and laughed to hide his annoyance, while she, still smiling, shook her head reproachfully. IV. When, a little later, Eva was alone with her lover, and she showed him the patterns which his friend had preferred, Frank began: "Eva--" She looked at him inquiringly, beaming with quiet happiness.