e
de Pastourelles; and to her right, himself, sitting crouched before
his easel, working with all his eyes and all his mind. The memory of
her was, as it were, physically stamped upon his sight, his hands;
such an intensity of study had he given to every detail of her face
and form. Did he like her? He didn't know. There were a number of
curious resentments in his mind with regard to her. Several times in
the course of their acquaintance she had cheapened or humiliated him
in his own eyes; and the sensation had been of a sharpness as yet
unknown to him.

Of course, there was in it, one way or another, an aristocratic
insolence! There must be: to move so delicately and immaculately
through life, with such superfine perceptions, must mean that you were
brought up to scorn the common way, and those who walk in it. 'The
poor in a lump are bad'--coarse and ill-mannered at any rate--that
must be the real meaning of her soft dignity, so friendly yet so
remote, her impossibly ethereal standards, her light words that so
often abashed a man for no reasonable cause.

She had been sitting to him, off and on, for about six weeks.
Originally she had meant him to make a three-hour sketch of her. He
triumphed in the remembrance that she and Lord Findon had found the
sketch so remarkable that, when he had timidly proposed a portrait in
oils, Lord Findon himself had persuaded her to sit. Since that moment
his work on the portrait, immediately begun, had absorbed him to such
a degree that the 'Genius Loci,' still unfinished, had been put aside,
and must have its last touches when he returned to town.

But in the middle of the sittings, Madame de Pastourelles being away,
and he in a mood to destroy all that he had done, he had suddenly
spent a stray earning on a railway ticket to Paris.

There--excitement!--illumination!--and a whole fresh growth of
ambition! Some of the mid-century portraits in the Luxembourg, and in
a loan exhibition then open in the Rue Royale, excited him so that
he lost sleep and appetite. The work of Bastien-Lepage was also to
be seen; and the air rang with the cries of Impressionism. But the
beautiful surface of the older men held him. How to combine the
breadth of the new with the keeping, the sheer _pleasure_ of the old!
He rushed home--aflame!--and fell to work again.

And now he found himself a little more able to cope with his sitter.
He was in possession, at any rate, of fresh topics--need not feel
hims