Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/169

 selle Ludérac. For he could never see her, never in the sense of possessing his vision; this was the lack, the failure that urged him on. There, among the rainswept vistas, he stopped and pondered. No; he could not see her face. To his potent, creative memory, the experience was a new one. Mademoiselle Ludérac was an aspect of nature and never before had nature evaded him. She was an aspect of nature and he had needed only, until now, to look upon such a one in order to possess its secret; for in the aspect was the secret and its discovery, its expression, was the artist's task and ecstasy. They were there, waiting in memory for his summons, because he had chosen to look at them, those significant aspects;—yet Mademoiselle Ludérac, whom he had chosen to look at for an hour, he could not summon. When he tried to see her, all that came clearly were her hands. It was as if her hands, helplessly, had allowed themselves to be mastered by his vision. He could see them placing the daffodils as if before a shrine; he could see them laid in mastery upon the harp; taking curious heraldic attitudes when thumb and little finger plucked at difficult chords; dissolved, while the arpeggios flowed from under them, into multiplied delicacies, or lay flat upon the strings, with a sudden mysterious urgency, to hush their golden whispering.

Why could he not see her face? He knew what it was like; accurately. He could have catalogued it; but he could not see it. Was it because of her eyes that he could not see her? When he looked at her, they met his