Theodora did not insist, but her glance said: "I will be revenged for this resistance to my wishes!"
When I had found her the portrait, I laid the open book back upon her knees. Theodora bent over it with an unaffected exclamation of delight. "How exquisite! and how well you have done it! What a talent you must have!"
"Oh no, no talent," I said hastily. "It's easy to do a thing like that when your heart is in it."
Theodora looked up at me and said simply, "This is a woman."
And I looked back in her eyes and said as simply, "Yes, it is a woman."
Theodora was silent, gazing at the open leaf, absorbed. And half-unconsciously my eyes followed hers and rested with hers on the page.
Many months had gone by since I had opened the book; and many, many cigars, that according to Tolstoi deaden every mental feeling, and many, many pints of brandy that do the same thing, only more so, had been consumed, since I had last looked upon that face. And now I saw it over the shoulder of this woman. And the old pain revived and surged through me, but it was dull—dull as every emotion must be in the near neighbourhood of a new object of desire—every emotion except one.
"Really it is a very beautiful face, isn't it?" she said at last, with a tender and sympathetic accent, and as she raised her head our eyes met.
I looked at her and answered, "I should say yes, if we were not looking at it together, but you know beauty is entirely a question of comparison."
Her face was really not one-tenth so handsome as the mere shadowed, inanimate representation of the Persian girl, beneath
