"I know they're good," he said. And, half laughingly: "I'm beginning
to find out that you're a rather wonderful and formidable and
overpowering girl, Ruhannah."
"You don't think so!" she exclaimed, enchanted. "Do you? Oh, dear!
Then I feel that I ought to show you my pictures and set you right
immediately----" She sprang to her feet. "I'll get them; I'll be only
a moment----"
She was gone before he discovered anything to say, leaving him to walk
up and down the deserted room and think about her as clearly as his
somewhat dislocated thoughts permitted, until she returned with both
arms full of portfolios, boards, and panels.
"Now," she said with a breathless smile, "you may mortify my pride and
rebuke my vanity. I deserve it; I need it; but Oh!--don't be too
severe----"
"Are you serious?" he asked, looking up in astonishment from the first
astonishing drawing in colour which he held between his hands.
"Serious? Of course----" She met his eyes anxiously, then her own
became incredulous and the swift colour dyed her face.
"Do you like my work?" she asked in a fainter voice.
"Like it!" He continued to stare at the bewildering grace and colour
of the work, turned to another and lifted it to the light: "What's this?" he demanded.
"A monotype."
"You did it?"
"Y-yes."
He seemed unable to take his eyes from it--from the exquisite figures
there in the sun on the bank of the brimming river under an
iris-tinted April sky.
"What do you call it, Rue?"
"Baroque."
He continued to scrutinise it in silence, then drew another carton
prepared for oil from the sheaf on the sofa.
Over autumn woods, in a windy sky, high-flying crows were buffeted and
blown about. From the stark trees a few phantom leaves clung,
fluttering; and the whole scene was possessed by sinuous, whirling
forms--mere glimpses of supple, exquisite shapes tossing, curling,
flowing through the naked woodland. A delicate finger caught at a dead
leaf here; there frail arms clutched at a bending, wind-tossed bough;
grey sky and ghostly forest were obsessed, bewitched by the winnowing,
driving torrent of airy, half seen spirits.
"The Winds," he said mechanically.
He looked at another--a sketch of the Princess Naïa. And somehow it
made him think of vast skies and endless plains and the tumult of
surging men and rattling lances.
"A Cossack," he said, half to himself. "I never before realised it."
And he laid it aside and turned to the next.
"I haven't brought any life studies or school drawings," she said. "I
thought I'd just show you the--the results of them and of--of whatever
is in me."
"I'm just beginning to understand what is in you," he said.
"Tell me--what is it?" she asked, almost timidly.