"All this
summer, while I have been forced to endure the company of all sorts of
stupid people, I have been thinking of you and your work. And, you see, I
have come to you, the first possible moment after my return home."
The man--being a man--could not remain wholly insensible to the alluring
physical beauty of the splendid creature who stood so temptingly before
him; but, to the honor of his kind, he could and did remain master of
himself.
The woman, true to her life training,--as James Rutlidge had been true to
his schooling when he approached Sibyl Andres in the mountains,--construed
the artist's manner, not as a splendid self-control but as a careful
policy. To her, and to her kind, the great issues of life are governed,
not at all by principle, but by policy. It is not at all what one is, or
what one may accomplish that matters; it is wholly what one may skillfully
_appear_ to be, and what one may skillfully provoke the world to say,
that is of vital importance. Turning from the painter to the easel, as if
to find in his portrait of her the fuller expression of that which she
believed he dared not yet put into words, she was about to draw aside the
curtain; when Aaron King checked her quickly, with a smile that robbed his
words of any rudeness.
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