Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/108

92 marble table with a "V'lá M'sieu," sent a smile accurately darted into his long eyes. He didn't know how to respond to Louise, or any other glances of the same sort in those days; but if I am encouraged to tell further of him, I can give the history of his initiation, for I am bold to say none knows it better—unless it be Louise herself.

What puzzled me about his face, which was a beautiful one, of the pure and refined Hebrew type so rarely met with—the type that was a little commoner, let us hope, in the days when God singled out His People—what puzzled me about it was that it should seem so familiar to me, for, as I say, the type is seldom found. When I came upon Wladislaw, hurrying down the street to the studio with the swiftness of a polecat—no sort of joke intended—it would flash upon me that surely I knew the face, yet not as one feels when one has met some one in a train or sat near him in a tramcar.

The mystery of this was explained before ever I had analysed to myself exactly how the face affected me and where I could have seen it before. It was at the eleven o'clock rest one morning, when the strife of tongues was let loose and I was moving among the easels and stools, talking to the various students that I knew. One of them, her book open, her eyes gleaming and her pencil avid of sketches, was lending a vague ear to the model, who had once been in England, and was describing his experiences with a Royal Academician. They were standing near the stove, the model, careless of the rapid alteration which the grateful heat was effecting in his skin tones, steadily veering from the transparent purple which had gratified an ardent impressionist all the morning, to a dull, hot scarlet upon the fronts of his thighs. While she was talking to the model, my friend was sketching Wladislaw, who ranged remotely at the cold end of the room. The