Age cannot wither it, for
experience is no part of the armor of the deceived, and Love and Trust have
never stopped to think since the world began.
As for the artist, each day now saw him slipping more deeply, more
comfortably back into the convolutions of his old impersonal shell. He had
been dragged out, not unwilling, by a giant passion, and he had sacrificed
to it, sent it to sleep again, and so returned. He felt infinitely kind to
Joan. A week after her visit to the linhay he, while sitting alone there,
had turned her picture about on the easel, withdrawn its face from the wall
and studied his work. And looking, with restored critical faculty and cold
blood, he loved the paint for itself and deemed it very good. The storm was
over, the transitory lightnings drowned lesser lights no more, and that
steady beacon-flame of his life, which had been merged, not lost, in the
fleeting blaze, now shone out again, steadfast and clear. Such a revulsion
of feeling argued well for the completion of his picture, ill for the model
of it.
They sat one day, as the weather grew more settled, beside a granite
bowlder, which studded the short turf at the extremity of Gorse Point,
where it jutted above the sea. Joan, with her chin upon her hands, looked
out upon the water; Barron, lying on a railway-rug, leaned back and smoked
his pipe and studied her face with the old, keen, passionless eagerness of
their earliest meetings.
Pages:
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176