It brought back the days in which he had come to the studio, and what it had meant to her for him to move in and out.  How dependent she had become upon his giving!  The imperishable memories of her life had arisen from those days, while she painted his portrait.  Beth realized this now—­days of strange achievement under his eyes—­errant glimpses of life’s inner beauty—­moments in which she had felt the power to paint even that delicate and fleeting shimmer of sunlight about a humming-bird’s wing, so intense was her vision—­their talks, and the ride—­well she knew that these would be the lights of her flagging eyes—­treasures of the old Beth, whose pictures all were painted.

It was hard to have known the joy of communion with his warm heart, and deeply seeing mind—­and now to accept the solitude again.  She felt that his going marked the end of her growth; that now it was a steady downgrade, body and mind....  Some time, long hence, she would meet him again....  She would be “Beth-who-used-to-paint-so-well.”  They would talk together.  The moment would come to speak of what they might have been to each other, save for the Wordlings of this world.  She would weep—­no, she would burst into laughing, and never be able to stop!  It would be too late.  A woman must not be drained by the years if she would please a man of flesh.  She could not keep her freshness after this; she had not the heart to try....  Thus at times her brain kept up a hideous grinding....  She could feel the years!...  Jim Framtree saw them.

She had found a note from him two days old under her studio-door.  He had telephoned repeatedly, and taken the trip over to Dunstan to see her....  Would she not allow him to call?  And now Beth discovered an amazing fact: 

She had been unable to keep her mind upon him, even during the moment required to read his single page of writing.  She wrote that he might come....

She heard his voice in the hall.  The old janitor of the building had remembered him.  Beth’s hands, which had lain idle, began leaping strangely from the inner turmoil.  She wished now she had met him somewhere apart from the studio.  His tone brought back thoughts too fast to be tabulated, and his accent was slightly English.  She divined from this he had been out of the country—­possibly had returned to New York on a British ship.  How well she knew his plastic intelligence!  It was so characteristic and easy for him—­this little affectation....  She was quite cold to him.  Bedient had put him away upon the far-effacing surfaces of her mind.

The knocker fell.  Rising, she learned her weakness.  As she crossed the room the mirror showed her a woman who has met many deaths.

He greeted her with excited enthusiasm, but the tension which her change in appearance caused, was imperfectly concealed by his words and manner....  She knew his every movement, his every thought before it was half-uttered, as a mother without illusions knows her grown son, who has failed to become the man she hoped.  They talked with effort about earlier days.  He treated her with a consideration he had never shown before.  The challenge of sex was missing.  Duty, and an old and deep regard—­these Beth felt from him.  She attributed it to the havoc of a few weeks upon her face.  She wished he would not come again; but he did.