Heavens!
What a tangle he had got into simply because he wanted a decent model
for his picture! The abominable prudery and hypocrisy of the time lay
behind the whole matter. But this would never do. He must work now; not
think of these exciting things. It was hardly a brief moment before to
his last words he added aloud,--
"Did what you said mean that I was to be favored with a confidence?"
A painful, deep problem was weighing upon her heart, wearing away her
reason and her life alike. She had almost been ready to ask advice of
the artist, although she by no means knew him well enough to render so
intimate a conversation other than strange.
"Not necessarily," was her reply to Fenton's question.
She found it after all impossible to utter anything definite upon the
subject which lay so near her heart. She even felt a dim wonder whether
she had really ever seriously contemplated speaking of it, even never
so remotely.
"I was thinking," she continued, "of the point the conversation had
reached this morning when I left my friend at the door downstairs."
"It was some great moral problem, I think you said," Fenton responded,
trying to recall accurately what she had told him earlier in the
sitting of a talk she had had with a friend on her way to the studio.
"The object of life, or something of that sort. Well, the object of
life is to endure life, I suppose, just as the object of time is to
kill time.
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