“Nothing ever really does that!” Egidia rejoined. Inwardly she said, “Oh, no, he can’t care for her.” And her face, unconsciously to herself, took on a joyous expression. She went on, with a manner of detached criticism: “I never, in all my literary life, met any one who lived in herself so completely. Keats speaks of a woman who would have liked to have been engaged to a poem and married to a novel, but Phœbe goes one better, she is her own poem, her own novel. No spectacle, no literature in the world interests her as much. She is always pulling herself up by the roots, as it were, to account for her moral--or immoral--growth, and telling one all about it.” “And does it bore you?” asked he. “On the contrary, it interests me deeply. And to do her justice, she is a charming companion, so gay, so lively. No one would imagine what she is suffering. The Merry Martyr, I call her.” There was the very slightest touch of mockery in her tone. He made no remark, and she continued: “I gave her that drawing you gave me--the one that had a sketch of her in it. She did want it so badly, poor girl, and after all, she sat for it, and had a better right to it than I!” “I will give you another!” said Rivers. “Will you really, Edmund? That is nice of you.” She flushed with pleasure. “Now I must go back to my young woman of the sea!” She laughed. “Be kind to her!” said Rivers, “but you are, I know. You are a good woman!” “Am I? But I get very angry with the lady sometimes, when she talks as if this divorce of hers was a sort of smart tea-party she was going to in the immediate future.” “But that is the right way to look at it,” said he, “and a tea party that won’t come off either!” Egidia stared at him; she wondered if this was the flippancy of bitterness or indifference? “They won’t be able to prove what is not true,” the artist went on, with some fire, but at the same time carefully laying and mixing burnt umber and madder brown on his palette. “There isn’t really the ghost of a case, as I told the old woman, her aunt, when she came and made me a scene. It will be all right. Elles will abandon the charge, or we will get it squared out of court. It isn’t worth thinking about.” He applied the mixture he had made with a firm square touch. “Oh, I see,” said Egidia, “that is why you are able to paint away so composedly! I was wondering--I had thought that in the face of such a possible horror you would have not been able to do anything. That is why I have distressed myself so much about it all. Are you sure you are not pretending--that you are not more disturbed than you care to own?” “I don’t let it trouble me,” he said, adding with a certain intentional deliberation, “I am an artist before all!”