There was a recess beside the great mantelpiece, and in it hung Regnault’s famous picture, “The Dancer,” all scarlet frock and white flesh against an amber background.

“That?” exclaimed O’Neill.  “Lola?”

Buscarlet nodded; he had forced a good effect.

“That is she,” he answered.

The picture was familiar to O’Neill; to him, as to many another young painter of that time, it was an upstanding landmark on the road of art.  He looked at it now, in the sparse light from the bedside lamp, with a fresh interest in its significance.  He saw with new understanding the conventionalism of the pose—­hip thrust out, arm akimbo, shoulder cocked—­contrasted against the dark vivacity of the face and all the pulsing opulence of the flesh.  It was an epic, an epic of the savage triumphant against civilization, of the spirit victorious against the forms of art.

He stared at it, Buscarlet smiling mildly at his elbow; then he turned away and went back to his seat.  The face on the bed was unchanged.

“So Regnault married Lola!” he said slowly.  “When?”

“Ah, who knows?” Buscarlet shrugged graphically.  “Many years ago, of course.  It is twenty years since she danced.”

“And what was he saying about her?” asked O’Neill.

“Nothing to any purpose,” replied Buscarlet.  “I think he had been dreaming of her.  You know the manner he has of waking up—­coming back to consciousness with eyes wide open and his mind alert, with no interval of drowsiness and reluctance?  Yes?  Well, he woke like that before I knew he had ceased to sleep.  ‘I should like to see her now,’ he said.  ‘Whom?’ I asked, and he smiled.  ‘Lola,’ he answered, and he went on to say that she was the one woman he had never understood.  ‘That was her advantage,’ he said, smiling still; ’for she understood me; yes, she knew me as if she had made me.’  After a while, he smiled again, and said, ‘Yes, I should like to see her now.’”

O’Neill frowned thoughtfully.  “Well, she ought to be here if she’s his wife,” he said.  “Is she in Paris, d’you know?  We might send for her.”

“I do not know,” replied Buscarlet.  “Nobody knows, but I have heard she retired upon religion.”

Their talk dwindled a little then.  O’Neill found himself dwelling in thought upon that long-ago marriage of the great artist with Lola, the dancer.  To him she was but a name; her sun had set in his boyhood, and there remained only the spoken fame of her wonderful dancing and a tale here and there of the fervor with which she had lived.  It was an old chronicle of passion and undiscipline, of a vehement personality naming through the capitals of Europe, its trail marked by scandals and violences, ending in the quick oblivion which comes to compensate for such lives.  On the whole, he thought, such a marriage was what one would have looked for in Regnault; as Buscarlet said, one might almost have guessed.  He, with his genius and his restlessness, his great fame and his infamy, the high achievement of his art and the baseness of his relaxations, he was just such another as Lola.