e I shall be able to say to myself that you can't have
been a fable--otherwise you'd have a moral; but that won't be enough,
because I'm not sure you won't have had one. Some day you'll peep in
here languidly and find me in such an attitude of piety--presenting my
bent back to you as I niggle over some interminable botch--that I shall
give cruelly on your nerves and you'll just draw away, closing the door
softly. You'll be gentle and considerate about it and spare me, you
won't even make me look round. You'll steal off on tiptoe, never, never
to return."

Gabriel consented to sit; he professed he should enjoy it and be glad to
give up for it his immediate foreign commerce, so vague to Nick, so
definite apparently to himself; and he came back three times for the
purpose. Nick promised himself a deal of interest from this experiment,
for with the first hour of it he began to feel that really as yet, given
the conditions under which he now studied him, he had never at all
thoroughly explored his friend. His impression had been that Nash had a
head quite fine enough to be a challenge, and that as he sat there day
by day all sorts of pleasant and paintable things would come out in his
face. This impression was not gainsaid, but the whole tangle grew
denser. It struck our young man that he had never _seen_ his subject
before, and yet somehow this revelation was not produced by the sense of
actually seeing it. What was revealed was the difficulty--what he saw
was not the measurable mask but the ambiguous meaning. He had taken
things for granted which literally were not there, and he found things
there--except that he couldn't catch them--which he had not hitherto
counted in or presumed to handle. This baffling effect, eminently in the
line of the mystifying, so familiar to Nash, might have been the result
of his whimsical volition, had it not appeared to our artist, after a
few hours of the job, that his sitter was not the one who enjoyed it
most. He was uncomfortable, at first vaguely and then definitely
so--silent, restless, gloomy, dim, as if on the test the homage of a
directer attention than he had ever had gave him less pleasure than he
would have supposed. He had been willing to judge of this in good
faith; but frankly he rather suffered. He wasn't cross, but was clearly
unhappy, and Nick had never before felt him contract instead of
expanding.

It was all accordingly as if a trap had been laid for him, and our young