Page:Frank Owen - Woman Without Love (1949 reprint).djvu/127

 "I'd like to have you," she said simply. "Your coming will be something for which to look forward."

"You can depend upon it," said he. "I'll come. Perhaps some day you will let me paint your portrait."

"But I am an old woman," she objected, "a fat ugly old woman with chins way down to here."

"You are entirely wrong," he said emphatically. "Beauty is something more than a shallow earthly surface appearance. If it were not, all the sensuous girls on magazine covers would be masterpieces. Needless to say they are not. They last no longer than last nights sunset. Great pictures must be of great subjects. But great subjects can concern themselves with simple things. Their greatness is a sort of veneer with which the artist varnishes the canvas. Take for instance Vincent Van Gogh's, 'Potato-Eaters,' a group of peasants with misshapen faces, eating their supper in the light of a kerosene lamp, or his 'Portrait of a Peasant Woman Rocking a Cradle.' Or Titian's portrait of 'Francis I,' the man with the tremendously long nose. Or Rembrandt's 'Portrait of An Old Man.' Better still, take Paul Gauguin's 'Tahitian Girl Reclining' or his 'Women in a Hut.' What color, what splendor, what music, what motion! Would any of these pictures do for a magazine cover? Not one! Why? Are they lacking in beauty? On the contrary, they are breathtaking. They are magnificent. Under this category you must fall. How Rembrandt or Van Gogh would have joyed to have painted you."

Madame Leota smiled. "You are a good friend," she said, "and you know how to make an old lady happy by making pretty speeches. It is odd that of all the men I have known the two who meant the most to me were artists, and neither of you were ever my lover. The other one was Steve Garland. He died thirty years ago. Yet his memory is as vivid as though I had been with him only yesterday. I suppose it is because he is never out of my thoughts for long. He knew the kind of a woman I was, but he painted my portrait, a queer portrait with the light so arranged that it formed a halo about the head."

"He too," broke in Ivan, "could see that there was something magnificent about you. I read a book recently. It didn't amount