a reproduction of Jethro's Daughter. He would
gaze in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the
imperfection of her skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair
that fell along her tired cheeks; and, adapting what he had already felt
to be beautiful, on aesthetic grounds, to the idea of a living woman,
he converted it into a series of physical merits which he congratulated
himself on finding assembled in the person of one whom he might,
ultimately, possess. The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts a
spectator to a work of art, now that he knew the type, in warm flesh
and blood, of Jethro's Daughter, became a desire which more than
compensated, thenceforward, for that with which Odette's physical charms
had at first failed to inspire him. When he had sat for a long time
gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli,
who seemed all the lovelier in contrast, and as he drew towards him
the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette
against his heart.

It was not only Odette's indifference, however, that he must take pains
to circumvent; it was also, not infrequently, his own; feeling that,
since Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer
to have very much to say to him when they did meet, he was afraid
lest the manner--at once trivial, monotonous, and seemingly
unalterable--which she now adopted when they were together should
ultimately destroy in him that romantic hope, that a day might come when
she would make avowal of her passion, by which hope alone he had become
and would remain her lover. And so to alter, to give a fresh moral
aspect to that Odette, of whose unchanging mood he was afraid of growing
weary, he wrote, suddenly, a letter full of hinted discoveries and
feigned indignation, which he sent off so that it should reach her
before dinner-time. He knew that she would be frightened, and that she
would reply, and he hoped that, when the fear of losing him clutched at
her heart, it would force from her words such as he had never yet heard
her utter: and he was right--by repeating this device he had won from
her the most affectionate letters that she had, so far, written him, one
of them (which she had sent to him at midday by a special messenger from
the Maison Doree--it was the day of the Paris-Murcie Fete given for
the victims of the recent floods in Murcia) beginning "My dear, my hand
trembles so that I ca