Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/110

94 courtesy and snatch that sketch from her, half-finished though it was; but of a sudden the door opened and the Professor came in. The impressionist, with a sour look at the model's thighs and a despairing consciousness that she would have to hear that her colour was too cold, shut her book with a snap and resumed her brushes.

I had to manœuvre cautiously a retreat to the stairway—for idlers were publicly discouraged during the Professor's visits and people who would leave off work at any minute when I dropped in to hear the news on ordinary mornings, looked up and frowned studiously over the creaking of my retreating boots.

It may have been about a week later that my acquaintance with Wladislaw commenced, and again the detailing of that circumstance is to serve another purpose one of these days; at any rate, we came across one another in a manner which is to a friendship what a glass frame is to a cucumber, and soon studio friends came to me for news of him, and my protection of him was an openly admitted fact. At first I had been somewhat burdened by a consciousness of his curious beauty; one is not often in the way of talking to a beautiful man of any kind, but I can imagine that classical beauty or historic beauty might be more easily supported. No particular deep would be touched by a meeting with Apollo or Antinous; neither awe, nor reverence, however discredited and worn-out its tradition, has ever attached to them. The counterpart of Montrose or the bonnie Earl o' Murray, much as one would like to meet either, would arouse only picturesque sentimental reflection; but to walk through the Jardin du Luxembourg on a sunny day eating gaufres, with—and I say it without the faintest intention of irreverence—with a figure of the Saviour of mankind beside you, is—is arresting. When the eye reposes unintentionally upon it in the silent