at one wants of a sitter. How can I paint you?"

"You can paint me all the rest of your life. I shall be a perpetual
sitter."

"I believe I could paint you without looking at you"--and his lighted
face shone down on her. "You do excuse me then from those dreary
places?"

"How can I insist after what you said about the pleasure of keeping
these days?" she admirably--it was so all sincerely--asked.

"You're the best woman on earth--though it does seem odd you should rush
away as soon as our little business is settled."

"We shall make it up. I know what I'm about. And now go!" She ended by
almost pushing him out of the room.

XXIII

It was certainly singular, in the light of other matters, that on
sitting down in his studio after she had left town Nick should not, as
regards the effort to project plastically some beautiful form, have felt
more chilled by the absence of a friend who was such an embodiment of
beauty. She was away and he missed her and longed for her, and yet
without her the place was more filled with what he wanted to find in it.
He turned into it with confused feelings, the strongest of which was a
sense of release and recreation. It looked blighted and lonely and
dusty, and his old studies, as he rummaged them out, struck him even as
less inspired than the last time he had ventured to face them. But amid
this neglected litter, in the colourless and obstructed light of a high
north window which needed washing, he came nearer tasting the
possibility of positive happiness: it appeared to him that, as he had
said to Julia, he was more in possession of his soul. It was frivolity
and folly, it was puerility, to spend valuable hours pottering over the
vain implements of an art he had relinquished; and a certain shame that
he had felt in presenting his plea to Julia that Sunday night arose from
the sense not of what he clung to, but of what he had given up. He had
turned his back on serious work, so that pottering was now all he could
aspire to. It couldn't be fruitful, it couldn't be anything but
ridiculous, almost ignoble; but it soothed his nerves, it was in the
nature of a secret dissipation. He had never suspected he should some
day have nerves on his own part to count with; but this possibility had
been revealed to him on the day it became clear that he was letting
something precious go. He was glad he had not to justify himself to the
critical, for this might have been a delicate business.