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12 painting your portrait—only, you see, you wanted the portrait painted."

"Oh, I know. I tell you, I never saw you so much alive—the mental part of you so completely awake—as in that last half hour, when you'd forgotten all about me! Your talk with me is only play, by comparison—it's like a cigarette or a cup of tea."

"It's play in the sense of being pleasure, if you like. But that's what talk with a charming woman ought to be, if I may state my humble opinion. No matter how clever the woman may be, or how much what she talks about may interest you, I maintain that the mere fact that you like to look at her, that you feel her charm, lightens the most intellectual conversation to a point where it may be called, perhaps, play. And for my part, I rejoice in it. A purely mental effort, a problem of form to solve, is something else. It demands a narrower, fiercer concentration. But how many things it leaves out!"

He laughed again, and his look expressed, certainly, a definite pleasure and some playfulness.

Impatience flashed from the lady's passionate eyes.

"I don't say that I give you any intellectual problems to solve," she said impetuously, " or that I make many calls on your deep mental capacity. Only one would like to be taken as seri-