The Duchessa caught his glance.
"Yes," she said; "your friend's novel. I told you I had been
re-reading it."
"Yes," said he.
"And--do you know--I 'm inclined to agree with your own
enthusiastic estimate of it?" she went on. "I think it's
extremely--but extremely--clever; and more--very charming, very
beautiful. The fatal gift of beauty!"
And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was
his own.
"Yes," said he.
"Its beauty, though," she reflected, "is n't exactly of the
obvious sort--is it? It does n't jump at you, for instance.
It is rather in the texture of the work, than on the surface.
One has to look, to see it."
"One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing,"
he safely generalised. But then--he had put his foot in the
stirrup--his hobby bolted with him. "It takes two to make a
beautiful object. The eye of the beholder is every bit as
indispensable as the hand of the artist. The artist does his
work--the beholder must do his. They are collaborators. Each
must be the other's equal; and they must also be like each
other--with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art, in
short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty
that jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired
of--is the skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really
beauty at all--it is only an approximation to beauty--it may be
only a simulacrum of it."
Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with
interest, with friendliness and perhaps with the least
suspicion of something else--perhaps with the faintest glimmer
of suppressed amusement; but interest was easily predominant.
"Yes," she assented . . . . But then she pursued her own train
of ideas. "And--with you--I particularly like the woman
--Pauline. I can't tell you how much I like her. I--it sounds
extravagant, but it's true--I can think of no other woman in
the whole of fiction whom I like so well--who makes so
curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit--her waywardness
--her tenderness--her generosity--everything. How did your
friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as
any woman I have ever known she's more real to me than most of
the women I know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she
breathes. Yet I have never known a woman resembling her. Life
would be a merrier business if one did know women resembling
her. She seems to me all that a woman ought ideally to be.
Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man? Or is
Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of
imagination?"