intended to remain
until June, but the spring there is bleaker than your own New England.
One morning I said to myself, Why not take a run down to Italy? Two days
later, I was on my way. But at Mori, instead of pushing straight on to
Verona, I drove over here, thinking it would be pleasanter to take the
boat. I arrived here at midnight. The next morning I looked out of the
window, and there, right in front of me, in that chalet, was my sphinx.
Well, the upshot of it was, I have been here ever since. I repainted the
entire picture--the old one wasn't good enough."

"I should like to see it very much," said Tristrem, less from interest
than civility.

"I wish you had come in time to see the original. She never suspected
that she had posed as a model, and though her window was just opposite
mine, I believe she did not so much as pay me the compliment of being
aware of my existence. There were days when she sat hour after hour
looking out at the lake, almost motionless, in the very attitude that I
wanted. It was just as though she were repeating the phrase that
Flaubert puts in the Sphinx's mouth, 'I am guarding my secret--I
calculate and I dream.' Wasn't it odd, after all, that I should have
found her in that hap-hazard way?"

"It was odd," Tristrem answered; "who was she?"

"I don't know. French, I fancy. Her name was Dupont, or
Duflot--something utterly _bourgeois_. There was an old lady with her,
her mother, I suppose. I remember, at _table d'hote_ one evening, a
Russian woman, with an 'itch' in her name, said she did not think she
was comme il faut. 'She is comme il _m'en_ faut,' I answered, and
mentally I added, 'which is a deuced sight more than I can say of you,
who are comme il n'en faut pas.' The Russian woman was indignant at her,
I presume, because she did not come to the public table. You know that
feeling, 'If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for you.' But my
sphinx not only did not appear at _table d'hote_, she did not put her
foot outside of the chalet. One bright morning she disappeared from the
window, and a few days later I heard that she had been confined. Shortly
after she went away. It did not matter, though, I had her face. Let me
give you another glass of Monkenkloster."

"She was married, then?"

"Yes, her husband was probably some brute that did not know how to
appreciate her. I don't mean, though, that she looked unhappy. She
looked impassible, she looked exactly the way I wanted t