When she came again to the studio, she was different, subdued,
evading, avoiding, smiling a little in her flushed diffidence at his
gay ease of manner--or assumption of both ease and gaiety.
He was inclined to rally her, tease her, but her reticence was not
all embarrassment. The lightest contact, the slightest caress from
him, added a seriousness to her face, making it very lovely under
its heightened color, and strangely childlike.
Model and master they would have remained no longer had it been for
him to say, he desiring now to make it a favor and concession on her
part to aid him professionally, she gravely insisting on
professionalism as the basis of whatever entente might develop
between them, as well as the only avowed excuse for her presence
there alone with him.
"Please. It's respectable," she insisted her agreeable, modulated
voice. "I had rather the reason for my coming here be
business--whatever else happens."
"What has happened," he said, balancing a handful of wet clay in one
hand and looking laughingly up at her, where she stood on the
model-stand, "is that a pretty girl strolled in here one day and
held up a mirror to a solemn ass who was stalking theatrically
through life. That solemn ass is very grateful for the glimpse he
had of himself. He behaved gratefully, didn't he?"
"Very," she said with a forced smile.
"Do you object to the manner in which he expressed his gratitude?"
She hung her head.
"No," she said.
After a while she raised her eyes, her head still lowered. He was
working, darkly absorbed as usual in the plastic mass under his
fingers.
She watched him curiously, not his hands, now, but his lean, intent
face, striving to penetrate that masculine mask, trying to
understand. Varying and odd reflections and emotions possessed her
in turn, and passed--wonder, bewilderment at herself, at him; a
slight sense of fear, then a brief and sudden access of shyness,
succeeded by the by glow of an emotion new and strange and deep. And
this, in turn, by vague bewilderment again, in which there was both
a hint of fear, and a tinge of something exquisite.
Within herself she was dimly conscious that a certain gaiety, an
irresponsibility and lightness had died out in her, perhaps
permanently, yet leaving no void. What it was that replaced these
she could not name--she only was conscious that if these had been
subdued by a newer knowledge, with a newer seriousness, this
unaccustomed gravity had left her heart no less tender, and had
deepened her capacity for emotion to depths as profound and
unexplored as the sudden mystery of their discovery by herself.