to entertain him, though
there was nothing forbidding in her manner. But happening presently,
while they waited, to glance at the droll old woman, he found her eyes
fixed on him in a singularly piercing, if singularly impassive, gaze.
She looked away again with no change of expression, shifting her weight
from one hip to the other, and something in the attitude suggested to
Gregory that she had spent a great part of her life in waiting. She had
a capacity, he inferred, for indefinite waiting. Karen came happily
running down the stairs, holding the key.

They went into the dim, white room where swathed presences stood as if
austerely welcoming them. Karen drew up the blind and Mrs. Talcott,
going to the end of the room, mounted a chair and dexterously twitched
from its place the sheet that covered the great portrait. Then, standing
beside it, and still holding its covering, she looked, not at it, but,
meditatively, out at the sea that crossed with its horizon line the four
long windows. Karen, also in silence, came and stood beside Gregory.

It was indeed a remarkable picture; white and black; silver and green.
To a painter's eye the arresting balance of these colours would have
first appealed and the defiant charm with which the angular surfaces
of the grand piano and the soft curves of the woman seated at it
were combined. The almost impalpable white of an azalea with its
flame-green foliage, and a silver statuette, poised high on a
slender column of white chalcedony, were the only accessories. But
after the first delighted draught of wonder it was the face of Madame
Okraska--pre-eminently Madame Okraska in this portrait--that compelled
one to concentration. She sat, turning from the piano, her knees
crossed, one arm cast over them, the other resting along the edge of the
key-board. The head drooped slightly and the eyes looked out just below
the spectator's eyes, so that in poise and glance it recalled somewhat
Michael Angelo's Lorenzo da Medici. And something that Gregory had felt
in her from the first, and that had roused in him dim hostilities and
ironies, was now more fully revealed. The artist seemed to have looked
through the soft mask of the woman's flesh, through the disturbing and
compelling forces of her own consciousness, to the very structure and
anatomy of her character. Atavistic, sub-conscious revelations were in
the face. It was to see, in terms of art, a scientific demonstration of
race, temperament,