"Of course the intimacy between two girls is a wholly different thing, and I don't know whether the relation between Miss Bell and myself affords any parallel to it--"

"Oh, Jack! And I thought--"

"What did you think, dearest?"

"I thought," said Janet, in a voice considerably m.u.f.fled by contact with his tweed coat collar, "that you were perfectly _madly_ in love with her."

"Heavens!" Kendal cried, as if the contingency had been physically impossible. "It is a man's privilege to fall in love with a woman, darling--not with an incarnate idea."

"It's a very beautiful idea."

"I'm not sure of that--it looks well from the outside.

But it is quite incapable of any growth or much, change,"

Kendal went on musingly, "and in the end--Lord, how a man would be bored!"

"You are incapable of being fair to her," came from the coat collar.

"Perhaps. I have something else to think of--since yesterday. Janet, look up!"

She looked up, and for a little s.p.a.ce Elfrida Bell found oblivion as complete as she could have desired between them. Then--

"You were telling me--" Janet said.

"Yes. Your Elfrida and I had a sort of friendship too--it began, as you know, in Paris. And I was quite aware that one does not have an ordinary friendship with her--it accedes and it exacts more than the common relation. And I've sometimes made myself uncomfortable with the idea that she gave me credit for a more faultless conception of her than I possessed; for the honest, brutal truth is, I'm afraid, that I've only been working her out.

When the portrait was finished I found that somehow I had succeeded. She saw it, too, and so I fancy my false position has righted itself. So I haven't been sincere to her either, Janet. But my conscience seems fairly callous about it. I can't help reflecting that we are to other people pretty much what they deserve that we shall be. We can't control our own respect."

"I've lost hers," Janet repeated, with depression, and Kendal gave an impatient groan.

"I don't think you'll miss it," he said.

"And, Jack, haven't you any--compunctions about exhibiting that portrait?"

"Absolutely none." He looked at her with candid eyes.

"Of course if she wished me to I would destroy it. I respect her property in it so far as that. But so long as she accepts it as the significant truth it is, I am entirely incapable of regretting it. I have painted her, with her permission, as I saw her, as she is. If I had given her a, squint or a dimple, I could accuse myself; but I have not wronged her or gratified myself by one touch of misrepresentation."

"I am to see it this afternoon," said Janet. Unconsciously she was looking forward to finding some measure of justification for herself in the portrait; why, it would be difficult to say.

"Yes; I put it into its frame with my own hands yesterday.

I don't know when anything has given me so much pleasure.

And so far as Miss Bell is concerned," he went on, "it is an unpleasant thing to say, but one's acquaintance with her seems more and more to resolve itself into an opportunity for observation, and to be without significance other than that. I tell you frankly I began to see that when I found I shared what she called her friendship with Golightly Ticke. And I think, dear, with people like you and me, any more serious feeling toward her is impossible."

"Doesn't it distress you to think that she believes you incapable of speaking of her like this?"

"I think," said Kendal slowly, "that she knows how I would be likely to speak of her."

"Well," Janet returned, "I'm glad you haven't reason to suffer about her as I do. And I don't know at all how to answer her letter."

"I'll tell you," Kendal replied. He jumped up and brought her a pen and a sheet of paper and a blotting pad, and sat down again beside her, holding the ink bottle. "Write 'My dear Miss Bell.'"

"But she began her letter, without any formality."

"Never mind; that's a cheapness that you needn't imitate, even for the sake of politeness. Write 'My dear Miss Bell.'"

Janet wrote it.

"'I am sorry to find,'" Kendal dictated slowly, a few words at a time, "'that the flaws in my regard for you are sufficiently considerable--to attract your attention as strongly as your letter indicates. The right of judgment in so personal a matter--is indisputably yours, however--and I write to acknowledge, not to question it.'"

"Dear, that isn't as I feel."

"It's as you will feel," Kendal replied ruthlessly. "Now add: 'I have to acknowledge the very candid expression of your opinion of myself--which does not lose in interest--by the somewhat exaggerated idea of its value which appears to have dictated it,--and to thank you, for your extremely kind offer to send me a picture. I am afraid, however--even in view of the idyllic considerations you mention--I cannot allow myself to take advantage of that--"

"On the whole I wouldn't allude to the shattered ideal--"

"Oh-no, dear. Go on."

"Or the fact that you probably wouldn't be able to hang it up," he added grimly. "Now write 'You may be glad to know that the episode in my life--which your letter terminates--appears to me to be of less importance than you perhaps imagine it--notwithstanding a certain soreness over its close.'"

"It doesn't, Jack."

"It will. I wouldn't say anything more, if I were you; just 'yours very truly, Janet Cardiff.'"

She wrote as he dictated, and then read the letter slowly over from the beginning. "It sounds very hard, dear,"

she said, lifting eyes to his which he saw were full of tears, "and as if I didn't care."

"My darling," he said, taking her into his arms, "I hope you don't--I hope you won't care, after to-morrow. And now, don't you think we've had enough of Miss Elfrida Bell for the present?"

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

At three o'clock, an hour before he expected the Cardiffs, John Kendal ran up the stairs to his studio. The door stood ajar, and with a jealous sense of his possession within, he reproached himself for his carelessness in leaving it so. He had placed the portrait the day before where all the light in the room fell upon it, and his first hasty impression of the place a.s.sured him that it stood there still. When he looked directly at it he instinctively shut the door, made a step or two forward, closed his eyes and so stood for a moment, with his hands before them. Then, with a groan, "d.a.m.nation!" he opened them again and faced the fact. The portrait was literally in rags: They hung from the top of the frame and swung over the bottom of it Hardly enough of the canvas remained unriddled to show that it had represented anything human.

Its destruction was absolute--fiendish, it seemed to Kendal.

He dropped into a chair and stared with his knee locked in his hands.

"d.a.m.nation!" he repeated, with a white face. "I'll never approach it again;" and then he added grimly, still speaking aloud, "Janet will say I deserved it."

He had not an instant's doubt of the author of the destruction, and he remembered with a flash in connection with it the little silver-handled Algerian dagger that pinned one of Nadie Palicsky's studies against the wall of Elfrida's room. It was not till a quarter of an hour afterward that he thought it worth while to pick up the note that lay on the table addressed to him, and then he opened it with a nauseated sense of her unnecessary insistence.

"I have come here this morning," Elfrida had written, "determined to either kill myself or IT. It is impossible, I find, notwithstanding all that I said, that both should continue to exist. I cannot explain further, you must not ask it of me. You may not believe me when I tell you that I struggled hard to let it be myself. I had such a hideous doubt as to which had the best right to live.

But I failed there--death is too ghastly. So I did what you see. In doing it I think I committed the unforgivable sin--not against you, but against art. It may be some satisfaction to you to know that I shall never wholly respect myself again in consequence." A word or two scratched out, and then: "Understand that I bear no malice toward you, have no blame for you, only honor. You acted under the very highest obligation--you could not have done otherwise. * * * * * And I am glad to think that I do not destroy with your work the joy you had in it.

Kendal noted the consideration of this final statement with a cynical laugh, and counted the asterisks. Why the devil hadn't he locked the door? His confidence in her had been too ludicrous. He read the note half through once again, and then with uncontrollable impatience tore it into shreds. To have done it at all was hideous, but to try and impress herself in doing it was disgusting.

He reflected, with a smile of incredulous contempt, upon what she had said about killing herself, and wondered, in his anger, how she could be so blind to her own disingenuousness. Five asterisks--she had made them carefully--and then the preposterousness about what she had destroyed and what she hadn't destroyed; and then more asterisks. What had she thought they could possibly signify--what could anything she might say possibly signify?

In a savage rudimentary way he went over the ethical aspect of the affair, coming to no very clear conclusion.