tunity for
more personal exchange of talk. All would go on as before. He had
nothing to say to Aurora or she to him that could not have been said
before an army of witnesses. Yet it was to him as if a touch of magic
had removed an impediment, and the mysterious effluvium which made the
vicinity of Mrs. Hawthorne calming, healing to him, had a chance to flow
and steep his nerves in a blessed quiet, a quiet which--one hardly knows
how to describe such a thing--was at the same time excitement.

Gerald did not really care for talking. He could, it was true, sit up
all night with Vincent Johns, discussing this subject and that; he could
split hairs and wander into every intricacy of argument with men and
artists; with women too he could sometimes be litigious. The bottom
truth was nevertheless that he did not care for talking. It had happened
to him to sigh for a world where nobody talked forever and ever.

What he cared for was faces. They were what discoursed to you, told the
veracious story of lives and emotions--not lamely, as words do, mingling
the trivial with the significant, but altogether perfectly. It rested
with you to understand.

Mrs. Hawthorne in talk was cheap as echoes of a traveling-circus tent:
you had the simple fooling of the clown, the plain good sense of the
farmer's wife, the children's ebullient joy in the show. But Mrs.
Hawthorne in silence and abstraction was allied to things august and
mysterious, things far removed from her own thoughts. These, while she
sat in her foolish jewels, unsuitable by day, were very likely busy with
her house, her dressmaker, the doings of her little set, gossip, the
personal affairs--who knows?--of the painter painting her. But,
profounder than words or thoughts, Mrs. Hawthorne's essential manner of
being related her to those forces of the world which the ancient mind
figured in the shapes of women. There was something present in her of
the basic kindness of old Earth, who wants to feed everybody, is ready
to give her breast to all the children. Her robust joyousness reposed,
one felt, on a reality, some great fact that made angers and anxieties
irrational.

The student of faces could not have maintained that he got these
impressions of his sitter through his eyes. It was more, after all, like
a reflection received on the sensitive plate of his heart.

One day Gerald began to hurry. He had had enough of it. The portrait was
finished in a few hours. The ladies were