Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/272

262 He noticed that her pallor had increased in the last minute or two.

"Yes, I do," she said with a return of her earlier defiant tone. "I can't help feeling that this picture is beautiful. I know there is nothing wrong about it—that there is nothing to be ashamed of in looking at it."

"Why should there be?" he demanded.

The girl's glance wandered involuntarily back toward the stairhead.

"They would say it was wrong."

That reiterated use of the pronoun began to impress him with the extent to which "they" had dominated and dwarfed her life.

"But some of the world's most beautiful and most valuable pictures are nudes," he protested. "Surely we don't need to go into all that!"

"I've felt that way," she said after a silence, as though the confession were a relinquishment of something momentous, of something which she would not lightly part with.

"Would you rather I didn't see this