"It's exactly you as you were at the moment." "Nonsense," she said; but she glowed. She knew it was not true, but she loved to believe he somehow, by some miracle, saw her so. The sketches were exquisite; little impressions of happy moments caught into immortality by a master. Hardly ever did he do more than her head and throat, and sometimes the delicate descent to her shoulder. The day she saw his idea of the back of her neck she flushed with pleasure, it was such a beautiful thing. "That's not me," she murmured. "Isn't it? I don't believe anybody has ever explained to you what you're like." "There wasn't any need to. I can see for myself." "Apparently that's just what you can't do. It was high time I came." "Oh, but wasn't it," she agreed earnestly. He thought her frankness, her unadorned way of saying what she felt, as refreshing and as surprising as being splashed with clear cold shining mountain water. He had never met anything feminine that was quite so near absolute simplicity. He might call her the most extravagantly flattering things, and she appreciated them and savoured them with a kind of objective delight that interested him at first extraordinarily. Then it began to annoy him. [Illustration: "But these are very wonderful," she said, taking up the sketches. "I wish I were really like that."] "You're as unselfconscious," he told her one afternoon a little crossly, when he had been ransacking heaven and earth and most of the poets for images to compare her with, and she had sat immensely pleased and interested and urging him at intervals to go on, "as a choir-boy." "But what a nice, clean, soaped sort of thing to be like!" she said. "And so much more alive than lettuces." "I wonder if you _are_ alive?" he said, staring at her; and she looked at him with her head on one side and told him that if she were not a bishop's daughter and a pastor's wife and a child of many prayers and trained from infancy to keep carefully within the limits of the allowable in female speech she would reply to that, "You bet." "But that's only if I were vulgar that I'd say that," she explained. "Gentility is the sole barrier, I expect really, between me and excess." "You and excess! You little funny, cold-watery, early-morningy thing. One would as soon connect the dawn and the fields before sunrise and small birds and the greenest of green young leaves with excess."