Sarah stood at a window, her back to him.

“I am his amanuensis. His assistant.”

“You serve as his model?”

“I see.”

“Sometimes.”

But he saw nothing; or rather, he saw in the corner of his eye one of the sketches on the table by the door. It was of a female nude, nude that is from the waist up, and holding an amphora at her hip. The face did not seem to be Sarah’s; but the angle was such that he could not be sure.

“You have lived here since you left Exeter?”

“I have lived here this last year.”

If only he could ask her how; how had they met? On what terms did they live? He hesitated, then laid his hat, stick and gloves on a seat by the door. Her hair was now to be seen in all its richness, reaching almost down to her waist. She seemed smaller than he remembered; more slight. A pigeon fluttered to alight on the sill in front of her; took fright, and slipped away. Downstairs a door opened and closed. There was a faint sound of men’s voices as they made their way below. The room divided them. All divided them. The silence became unbearable.

He had come to raise her from penury, from some crabbed post in a crabbed house. In full armor, ready to slay the dragon—and now the damsel had broken all the rules. No chains, no sobs, no beseeching hands. He was the man who appears at a formal soiree under the impression it was to be a fancy dress ball.

“He knows you are not married?”

“I pass as a widow.”

His next question was clumsy; but he had lost all tact.

“I believe his wife is dead?”

“She is dead. But not in his heart.”

“He has not remarried?”

“He shares this house with his brother.” Then she added the name of another person who lived there, as if to imply that Charles’s scarcely concealed fears were, under this evidence of population, groundless. But the name she added was the one most calculated to make any respectable Victorian of the late 1860s stiffen with disapproval. The horror evoked by his poetry had been publicly expressed by John Morley, one of those worthies born to be spokesmen (i.e., empty facades) for their age. Charles remembered the quintessential phrase of his condemnation: “the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs.” And the master of the house himself! Had he not heard that he took opium? A vision of some orgiastic menage a quatre—a cinq if one counted the girl who had shown him up—rose in his mind. But there was nothing orgiastic about Sarah’s appearance; to advance the poet as a reference even argued a certain innocence; and what should the famous lecturer and critic glimpsed through the door, a man of somewhat exaggerated ideas, certainly, but widely respected and admired, be doing in such a den of iniquity?

I am overemphasizing the worse, that is the time-serving, Morleyish half of Charles’s mind; his better self, that self that once before had enabled him to see immediately through the malice of Lyme to her real nature, fought hard to dismiss his suspicions.

He began to explain himself in a quiet voice; with another voice in his mind that cursed his formality, that barrier in him that could not tell of the countless lonely days, lonely nights, her spirit beside him, over him, before him… tears, and he did not know how to say tears. He told her of what had happened that night in Exeter. Of his decision; of Sam’s gross betrayal.

He had hoped she might turn. But she remained staring, her face hidden from him, down into the greenery below. Somewhere there, children played. He fell silent, then moved close behind her.

“What I say means nothing to you?”

“It means very much to me. So much I…”

He said gently, “I beg you to continue.”

“I am at a loss for words.”

And she moved away, as if she could not look at him when close. Only when she was beside the easel did she venture to do so.

She murmured, “I do not know what to say.”

Yet she said it without emotion, without any of the dawning gratitude he so desperately sought; with no more, in cruel truth, than a baffled simplicity.

“You told me you loved me. You gave me the greatest proof a woman can that… that what possessed us was no ordinary degree of mutual sympathy and attraction.”

“I do not deny that.”

There was a flash of hurt resentment in his eyes. She looked down before them. Silence flowed back into the room, and now Charles turned to the window.

“But you have found newer and more pressing affections.”

“I did not think ever to see you again.”

“That does not answer my question.”

“I have forbidden myself to regret the impossible.”

“That still does not—”

“Mr. Smithson, I am not his mistress. If you knew him, if you knew the tragedy of his private life… you could not for a moment be so…” But she fell silent. He had gone too far; and now he stood with rapped knuckles and red cheeks. Silence again; and then she said evenly, “I have found new affections. But they are not of the kind you suggest.”

“Then I don’t know how I am to interpret your very evident embarrassment at seeing you again.” She said nothing.

“Though I can readily imagine you now have… friends who are far more interesting and amusing than I could ever pretend to be.” But he added quickly, “You force me to express myself in a way that I abhor.” Still she said nothing. He turned on her with a bitter small smile. “I see how it is. It is I who have become the misanthropist.”

That honesty did better for him. She gave him a quick look, one not without concern. She hesitated, then came to a decision.

“I did not mean to make you so. I meant to do what was best. I had abused your trust, your generosity, I, yes, I had thrown myself at you, forced myself upon you, knowing very well that you had other obligations. A madness was in me at that time. I did not see it clearly till that day in Exeter. The worst you thought of me then was nothing but the truth.” She paused, he waited. “I have since seen artists destroy work that might to the amateur seem perfectly good. I remonstrated once. I was told that if an artist is not his own sternest judge he is not fit to be an artist. I believe that is right. I believe I was right to destroy what had begun between us. There was a falsehood in it, a—”

“I was not to blame for that,”

“No, you were not to blame.” She paused, then went on in a gentler tone. “Mr. Smithson, I remarked a phrase of Mr. Ruskin’s recently. He wrote of an inconsistency of conception. He meant that the natural had been adulterated by the artificial, the pure by the impure. I think that is what happened two years ago.” She said in a lower voice, “And I know but too well which part I contributed.”

He had a reawoken sense of that strange assumption of intellectual equality in her. He saw, too, what had always been dissonant between them: the formality of his language—seen at its worst in the love letter she had never received—and the directness of hers. Two languages, betraying on the one side a hollowness, a foolish constraint—but she had just said it, an artificiality of conception—and on the other a substance and purity of thought and judgment; the difference between a simple colophon, say, and some page decorated by Noel Humphreys, all scrollwork, elaboration, rococo horror of void. That was the true inconsistency between them, though her kindness—or her anxiety to be rid of him—tried to conceal it.

“May I pursue the metaphor? Cannot what you call the natural and pure part of the conception be redeemed—be taken up again?”

“I fear not.”

But she would not look at him as she said that.

“I was four thousand miles from here when the news that you had been found came to me. That was a month ago. I have not passed an hour since then without thinking of this conversation. You… you cannot answer me with observations, however apposite, on art.”