Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/225

Rh it was done, a little statuette of the dead baby, as he lived in her thoughts: a tiny naked creature lying with relaxed limbs, its heavy-eyed, deep-lined face expressing all the pathos of life manqué. At Basil's almost weeping protest Teresa silently put away the little image, and did not touch her clay again.

Isabel, in the second portrait, instinctively wanted to have expressed her charm as a woman—the thing by which she had tried to attach Basil, and, as she knew, failed. She had chosen a dress of black velvet, which in the evening brought out wonderfully the intensity of her hair and eyes, and subdued her Spanish skin to ivory. But the harsh light of the studio denied her all charm of mystery and suggestion; even as the keen reality of Basil's nature had stripped their relation of the romance, the sentimentality, which she had striven to give it, and brought out its essential commonplace. After four sittings under the painter's cool gaze, it became apparent that the portrait would have nothing of what she wanted. With her usual impetuosity Isabel expressed her dissatisfaction.

"Basil, you are making me out an old hag! I won't be painted like that, I'm not like that, I'm not ugly! You are doing it on purpose! …"

Basil shrugged his shoulders.