London (England) -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
While waiting for her, he paced quickly up and down the room. All
hesitation and all doubt had vanished; his pulse beat quickly; he longed
to be away with her: to see her seated before him, the rebel whom he
hoped to tame. Yet with this certainty there mixed a last remnant of
reason: before he gave himself he must be sure that she was his. He
could not bring himself seriously to mistrust her, but he realized that
he was holding out a rescuing hand to a lonely, desperate, possibly
cunning woman. She might clutch at it in helplessness; he longed that
she should clasp it in love.
Though the drive was long it seemed only too short to him. She scarcely
spoke at all, but looked straight ahead, wistfully, as it seemed to him,
as though she were watching a world of men and women in which she only
was sad. He, too, was silent, content to look at her, noting every
beauty of her face, the graceful carriage of her head, the evanescent
loveliness of her hair.
“Here we are!” he exclaimed, as he led the way into the studio. “Shan’t
I just make a nuisance of myself! You’ll have to sit still, though you
can talk. I can listen while I work.”
“What a lovely room!” she said, looking round at the deep archway before
the carved oak fireplace; the opposite arch, the recess with the daïs
and the wide expanse of latticed windows with the clear lights above;
the parqueted floor, strewn with rugs and skins; the carved chairs and
the luxurious settee—the display of somber, costly, beautiful things.
“What a lovely room! I couldn’t work in a room like this—but then I’ve
never found a room in which I could work, since I left the country.”
She threw off her wraps and flung them with her hat—recklessly—on a
couch, and then stood warming her hands at the fire.
“I don’t think you were made for working,” he said, standing close
beside her, looking down upon her as she bent to the blaze, which shed a
warmth of crimson over her face. “You were meant to help others to
work.”
“You?”
“Ever so much, I fancy.”
“Tell me what I’m to do, and I’ll try.”
He brought over to the fireside an old-fashioned, plain wooden chair,
with high, stiff back and broad, flat arms.
“There—sit there—straight up—I shan’t keep you like that for long at
a stretch; grip the ends of the arms slightly—and look into the fire;
look like you did, as far as you can, that afternoon when I called you
the rebel.”
She took the position he directed, while he sat down on a stool at a
little distance and began to sketch rapidly upon a block on his knee.
“I want to rough it out,” he said, as he tore off a sheet of the paper
and flung it on the floor, “until I’ve caught the pose, and then I’ll
start to get it on a canvas.”
At first he worked quickly, the while she watched him with keen
interest. She knew that if she had aroused deep emotion in him, he could
not continue this make-believe of absorption in his work, could not long
keep up this semblance of looking upon her simply as a model.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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