She was looking at him in a kind of alarm. This was the longest speech by far he had made, and she could not imagine what was coming at the end. He was busy as usual flinging her on to paper--the number of his studies of her was by this time something monstrous--and was glancing at her swiftly and professionally at every sentence.

"About husbands. Tell me what you think about husbands."

"About husbands? But _they're_ not bad taste," she said.

"Tell me what you think about them."

"Well, they're people one is very fond of," she said, with her hands clasped round her knees.

"Oh. You find that?"

"Yes. Don't you?"

"I never had one."

"The advantages of being a woman! They're people one is fond of once and for all. They rescue one from Redchester. They're good and kind. They help one roll up great b.a.l.l.s of common memories, and all the memories grow somehow into tender things at last. And they're patient. Even when they've found out how tiresome one is they still go on being patient.

And--one loves them."

"And--they love you?"

She flushed. "Of course," she said.

"You're amusing with your of courses and once for alls. Really you know there are no such things. Nothing necessarily follows. I mean, not when you get to human beings."

Ingeborg fidgeted. Too well did she know the dishonesty of her Of course; too well did she remember the sudden switching off, after Zoppot, of Robert's love. But the rest was strictly true anyhow, she thought. She did love him--dear Robert. The difference between him and an amazing friend like Ingram was, she explained to herself, that she was interested in Ingram, profoundly interested, and she was not interested in Robert. That, she supposed, was because she loved Robert.

Perfect love, she said to herself, watching with careful attention the approach of a hairy and rather awful caterpillar across the path towards her shoes, perfect love cast out a lot of things besides fear. It cast out, for instance, conversation. And interest, which one couldn't very well have without conversation. Interest, of course, was an altogether second-rate feeling compared to love, and because it was second-rate it was noisier, expressing itself with a copiousness unnecessary when one got to the higher stages of feeling. One loved one's Robert, and one kept quiet. Far the highest thing was to love; but--she drew her feet up quickly under her--how very interesting it was being interested!

"Well?" he said, looking at her, "go on."

"Well, but I can't go on because I've finished. There isn't any more."

"It's a soon exhausted subject."

"That's because it's so simple and so--so dear. You know where you are with husbands."

"You mean you know you're not anywhere."

"Oh," she said, throwing back her head and facing him courageously, "how you don't _realise_! And anyhow," she added, "if that were true it would be a very placid and restful state to be in."

"Negation. Death. Do you find it placid and restful with me?"

"No," she said quickly.

He put down his brushes and stared at her. "What a mercy!" he said.

"What a mercy! I was beginning to be afraid you did."

By the end of the third week an odd thing had happened. He was no nearer piercing through her outer husk to any emotions she might possess than before, but she, astonishingly, had pierced through his.

The outer husk of Ingram at this time and for some years previously was a desire at all costs to dodge boredom, to get tight hold of anything that promised to excite him, squeeze it with diligence till the last drop of entertainment had been extracted, and then let it go again considerably crumpled. It was the kind of husk that causes divergences of opinion with one's wife. And behind it sat, wrapped in flame, the thing that was with him untouchably first, his work. He did not know how or why, but in that third week Ingeborg got through this husk and became mixed up in a curious inextricable way with the flaming holy thing inside.

High above, immeasurably above, any interest he had ever felt in women was his work. The divers love-makings with which his past bristled as an ancient churchyard bristles with battered tombstones, had all been conducted as it were on his doorstep. He came out to the lady, the lady destined so soon to be a tombstone, often with pa.s.sion, sometimes with illusions, and always with immense goodwill to believe that here was the real thing at last, but she never came in. She might and did catch cold there for anything he cared, she should never cross the threshold and start interfering, delaying, coming between. In the end she got left out there alone, along with the sc.r.a.per, feeling chilly.

And here was Ingeborg through the door, and not interfering, not delaying, but positively furthering.

The increasing beauty of his studies of her first made him suspect it.

Their beauty began to surprise him, to take him unawares, as though it were a thing outside and apart from his own will. He had found so few things in humanity that seemed beautiful, and his pictures had been pictures of resentments--impish and wonderful exposures by a master of the littleness at the back of brave shows. For a fortnight now he had sketched and sketched and splashed about with colour just as an excuse for staying on, in the desire to make love to Ingeborg, to refresh himself for a s.p.a.ce at this unexpectedly limpid little spring. He had been attracted, irritated, increasingly attracted, greatly exasperated, greatly attracted. He had grown eager, determined, almost anxious at last. But these various emotions had been felt by him strictly on his doorstep. She was merely a subst.i.tute, and at that only a temporary subst.i.tute, for the Caucasus.

Then in the third week he perceived that she had left off being that.

She was no longer just an odd little thing, an attractive, delicious little thing to him, of the colouring he best loved, the fairness, the whiteness, a thing that offered up incense before him with unflagging zeal, a thing full of contentments and generous ready friendship; she still was all that, but she was more. Like Adam when G.o.d breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, she had become a living soul, and that of which she was the living soul was his work. Not only her soul but his had begun to get into his studies of her. Each successive study unveiled more of an inner beauty. Each fixed into form and colour qualities in her and qualities in him who apprehended them that he had not known were there. It was as if he watched, while his hand was held and guided sure swift touch by sure swift touch by some one else, some one altogether greater, some splendid master from some splendid other world, who laid hold of him as one lays hold of a learner and showed him these things and said at each fresh stroke, "Look--this is what she is like, the essence of her, the spirit ... and see, it is what you are like, too, for you recognise it."

In that third week late one afternoon they went on the lake. Ingeborg paddled slowly along the middle of the quiet water towards the sunset, and Ingram sat at the other end with his back to it and watched her becoming more and more transfigured as the sun got lower.

Very early in their acquaintance he had conveyed to her that she ought always to wear white and that hats were foolish and unnecessary; therefore she did wear white, and sat hatless in the punt. The light blinded her. She could see nothing of him but a dark hunch against a blaze of sky. But when she wanted to turn the punt towards the relief of the shadows along the sh.o.r.e he instantly stopped her, and told her to keep on straight into the eye of the sun.

"But I can't see," she said.

"But I can. It's for my picture. It's going to be a study of light."

"Shall you be able to do it from the sketches?"

"No. From you."

"Why, you said you couldn't anywhere here because there wasn't a proper place."

"There isn't. I'm going to do it in Venice. In my studio there."

"But can you from memory?"

"No. From you."

She laughed. "How I wish I could!" she said. "I ache and ache to see things, to go to Italy--"

She sighed. The vision of it was unendurably beautiful.

"Well, you'll have to. Not only because it's monstrous you shouldn't, monstrous and shocking and unbelievable that you should be stuck in Kokensee for years on end and never see or hear or know any of the big things of life, but because you can't spoil my great picture--the greatest I shall ever have done."

"Robert could never leave his work."

"I don't want Robert to leave anything. It's you I'm going to paint. And I can't do without you."

"How very awkward," she smiled, "because Robert can't do without me, either."

He plunged his arm into the water with sudden extreme violence, scooped a handful of it high into the air, and dashed it back again.

It had seemed to him obvious throughout his life that when it came to the supremest things not only did one give up everything oneself for them but other people were bound to give up everything, too. The world and the centuries were to be enriched--he had a magnificent private faith in his position as a creator--and it was the duty of those persons who were needful to the process to deliver themselves, their souls and bodies, up to him in what he was convinced was an entirely reasonable sacrifice. If any one were necessary to his work, even only indirectly by keeping him content while he did it so that he could produce his best, it was that person's duty to come to his help. A paramount duty; pa.s.sing the love of home or family. He would do as much, he was convinced, for some one else who should instead of him possess the gift. Here had he been in a state of dissatisfaction and restlessness for years, and his work, though his reputation leapt along, was, he very well knew, not what it could have been. Boredom had seized him; a great disgust of humanity. There had been hara.s.sing private complications; his wife had turned tiresome, refusing to understand. And now he had found this--this thing, he thought, looking at her in the kind of fury that seized him at the merest approach to any thwarting that touched his work, of light and fire and cleanness, this little hidden precious stone, hidden for him, waiting for him to come and make of her a supreme work of art, and she was putting forward middle-cla.s.s obstacles, Philistine difficulties, ludicrous trivialities--Robert, in short--to the achievement of it.

"Do you realise," he said, leaning forward and staring at her with his strange pale eyes, "what it means to be painted by me?"

"My utter glorification," she answered, "my utter pride."