“I don’t believe I shall ever want to marry.  Do I look like a domestic person?  In any case, I am quite sure I shouldn’t want to marry a man if he objected to my being a model for a great picture to my own cousin.  Why, Trevor, we are part of each other, as it were.  I am like your own sister.  What can it matter?  While you are painting me I shall be nothing, the picture will be everything.  I am no more than a dream or vision which might come before you, and you will give me life, immortality on your canvas.  As an old woman when all beauty has gone from me, I shall be there alive, young, beautiful still.”

“It is all sophistry, dearest, I can’t do it.”

“You will when you have thought it all over,” she said softly, “at least if you think I should do—­are you sure of that?”

She rose and stood for a moment, one hand outstretched towards the mantelpiece, and resting there for support.  The velvet gown clung to her, and almost every line of her form could be followed with the eye or divined.  The throat was long, round, and full, the fall of the shoulder and the way its lines melted into the curves of the breast had the very intoxication of beauty in them, the waist was low, slender, and perfect, the main line to the knee and on to the ankle absolutely straight.  To my practised eyes the clothing had little concealment.  I knew that here was all that I wanted.

“I am supposed to have a very perfect figure,” she said with a faint smile, “and it seems rather a pity to use it so little.  To let it be of service to you, to give you just what you want, to create a great picture, to save you all further worry over it, which is quite knocking you up, would be a great happiness to me.”

She paused.  I said nothing.

“I do not think I must stay any longer,” she said glancing at my clock, “nor shall I persuade you any more.  I leave it entirely in your hands.  Write to me if you want me to come.  Perhaps you may find another model.”

She smiled up at me.  Her face had a curious delicate beauty hard to define.  The beauty of a very transparent skin and sapphire eyes.

I bent over her and kissed her bright scarlet lips.

“Dearest! if you only knew how I appreciate all you have said, how good I think it of you!  And I could never find a lovelier model; you know it is not that thought which influences me, but it is impossible.  You must not think of it.”

“Very well,” she said with a laugh in her lovely eyes, “but you will!”

She disengaged herself from me, picked up a fur necklet from her chair, and went to the door.

“Good-night,” she said softly, and went out.

Left to myself, I walked restlessly up and down the room.  She was right.  I could think of nothing but her words to me, and how her visit had changed my mood and all the atmosphere about me!  It seemed as if she had filled it with electricity.  My pulses were all beating hard.  The quiet of the studio was intolerable.  I was dining out that evening, and then going on to a dance.  I would dress now a little early and then go to the club and spend the intermediate time there.