it was!  The best thing of a lifetime!  Viola seemed so long behind the screen I grew anxious and walked over to it.  As I came round it, she was just drawing on her bodice, her arms and neck were still bare.  She motioned me back imperatively, and I saw the colour stream across her face.  I retreated.  It was absurd in a way, that blush as my eyes rested on her then, I who just now ... and yet perfectly reasonable, understandable.  Then she was the Phryne, a vision to me, as she had said, in ancient Athens.  And now we were modern man and woman again.  All that we do in this life takes its colour from our attitude of mind towards it, and but for her artist’s mind, a girl like Viola could never have done what she had at all.

In a moment more she came from behind the screen.  She looked white and cold, and came towards the fire shivering.  I drew her into my arms, strained her against my breast, and kissed her over and over again in a passion of gratitude.

“How can I thank you!  You have done for me what no one else could.  I can never tell you what I feel about it.”

She put her arms round my neck, and kissed me in return.

“Any one would do all they could for you, I think,” she said softly.  “You are so beautiful and so nice about things I am only too happy to have been of use to you.”

“What a brute I was to have forgotten you were standing so long.  Was it very bad?  Were you cold?”

“At the end I was, but I shouldn’t have moved for that.  I got so cramped.  I couldn’t keep my limbs still any longer.  I was sorry to be so stupid and have to disturb you.”

“I can’t think how you stood so well,” I said remorsefully, “and so long.  It is so different for a practised model.”

“Well, I did practise keeping quite still in one position every day all this last week, but of course a week is not long.”

I had pressed the bell, and tea was brought in.  I busied myself with making it for her.  She looked white and ill.  I felt burning with a sense of elation, of delighted triumph.  The picture was there.  It glimmered a white patch against the chair a little way off.  The idea was realised, the inspiration caught, all the rest was only a matter of time.

We drank our tea in silence.  Viola looked away from me into the fire.  She did not seem constrained or embarrassed.  Having decided to do, as she had, and conquer her own feelings, she did so simply, grandly, in a way that suited the greatness of her nature.  There was no mincing modesty, no self-conscious affectation.  The agony of confusion that she had felt in that moment when she had stood before me with her hand on the clasp of her girdle, had been evident to me, but her pride forced her to crush it out of sight.

I went over to her low chair and sat down at her feet.

“Do you know you have shown me this afternoon something which I did not believe existed—­an absolutely perfect body without a fault or flaw anywhere.  I did not believe there could be anything so exquisitely beautiful.”