Suddenly she sat up and turned to me.  I saw her heart must be beating fast, for her face and lips had grown quite white.

“Trevor, I wish you would let me be your model for the Phryne.”

Almost immediately she had spoken the colour rushed in a burning stream across her face, forcing the tears to her eyes.  I saw them brim up, sparkling to the lids, in the firelight.

I sat up in my chair, leaning forwards towards her.  My own heart seemed to rise with a leap into my throat.

“Dearest!  I could not think of such a thing!  It is so good of you, but....”

I stopped.  She had sunk back in her chair.  She was looking away from me.  I saw the tears well up over the lids and roll slowly unchecked down her face.

“I should so like to be of use to you,” she murmured in a low tone, “and I think I could be in that way, immense use.”

I slid to my knees beside her chair, and took the slim, delicate white hand that hung over the arm in mine and pressed it, very greatly moved and hardly knowing what to answer her.

“I shall never forget you have offered it, never cease to be grateful, but....”

“There is no question of being grateful,” she broke in gently, “unless it were on my side.  I should think it an honour to be made part of your work, to live for ever in it, or at least much longer than in mortal life.  What is one’s body?  It is nothing, it perishes so soon, but what you create will last for centuries at least.”

I pressed my lips to her hand in silence.  I felt overwhelmed by the suggestion, by the unselfishness, by the grandeur of it.  I saw that the proposition stood before her mind in a totally different light from that in which it would present itself to most women.  But, then, the outlook of an artist upon life and all the things in life is entirely different from that of the ordinary person.  It takes in the wide horizon, it embraces a universe, and not a world, it sweeps up to the large ideals, the abstract form of things, passing over the concrete and the actual which to ordinary minds make up the all they see.

And Viola was an artist:  she expressed herself in music as I did in painting.  Our temperaments were alike though our gifts were different, and we served the same mystical Goddess though our appointments in her temple were not the same.

As an artist the idea was, to me, simple enough, as a man it horrified me.

“I could not allow it.”

She turned upon me.

“Why?” she said simply.

“Well, because ... because it is too great a sacrifice.”

“I have said it is no sacrifice.  It is an honour.”

“It would injure you if it became known.”

“It will not become known.”

“Everything becomes known.”

“Well, I shouldn’t care if it did.”

“By and by you might regret it.  It might stand in the way of your marrying some one you loved.”