"Would you care to paint me as
the Goddess of Love?"
He, still, did not look at her; but answered, while, with deliberate care,
he selected a few brushes from the Chinese jar near the easel, "Venus is
always a very popular subject, you know."
She did not speak for a moment or two; and the painter felt her watching
him. As he turned to his canvas--still careful not to look in her
direction--she said, suggestively, "I suppose you could change the face so
that no one would know it was I who posed."
The man remembered her carefully acquired reputation for modesty, but held
to his purpose, saying, as if considering the question seriously, "Oh, as
for that part; it could be managed with perfect safety." Then, suddenly,
he turned his eyes upon her face, with a gaze so sharp and piercing that
the blood slowly colored neck and cheek.
But the painter did not wait for the blush. He had seen what he wanted and
was at work--with the almost savage intensity that had marked his manner
while he had worked upon the portrait of Sibyl Andres.
And so, day after day, as he painted, again, the portrait of the woman who
Conrad Lagrange fancifully called "The Age," the artist permitted her to
betray her real self--the self that was so commonly hidden from the world,
under the mask of a pretended culture, and the cloak of a fraudulent
refinement.
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