"You still want a touch or two. Just get into position for one moment."
"You'll spoil me," she warned, jumping to her place on the "throne," and
shooting out an ankle that would have unhinged Diogenes.
"Nothing could spoil you," I said gallantly, and a paint tube levelled
in the direction of my head was the reward of my politeness.
"You don't aim as well as you dance. How did you learn--at a training
school, or where?"
"To dance? Bah! training schools can't teach the fine poetry of
movement. They knock the prose into you, but--but the poetry I learnt
from--O--a man who was great in his day."
"Salvador?" I ventured.
She blushed faintly.
"How did you know?"
"You gave the cue. Salvador was the greatest name I could think of----"
"You know something of dancing, then?"
"Very little. I have heard he had an accident or something that affected
his career."
"Yes; it turned his head. He was to have married me, but, like all men,
he was ungrateful. He changed--changed quite suddenly."
"How so?"
"I nursed him night and day. He had no mother, no sister, and I thought
I could be all the world to him. Little girls are romantic, and he was
too ill to know. Before he recovered consciousness I sent an old woman
to attend him; but one fine day, when well enough, he bolted."
"Where?"
"Lord knows!" (Betty's language was not Johnsonian.) "Do you think I was
going to crawl after him and grovel----?"
"There is no grovelling where love levels."
"But it didn't level," she said, angrily, as though the reproach
stung--"it didn't level. I would have chucked my whole future for him: I
would now, while he.... O, don't talk of it," she exclaimed huskily,
whisking the back of her hand across her eyes: "I tell myself it was all
for the best."
The tone implied a query, but I made no answer. There were heart thrills
in the air, and my brush, pregnant with their subtle rhythm, was
travailling fast.
"Why don't you say it was?" she persisted. "You know that love--real
love--is worse than handcuffs."
"'A cloying treacle to the wings of independence'--eh? Keats would have
been glad of the treacle nevertheless."
"Perhaps. Wouldn't we just drown in it if we could?... But, after all, I
should have been a fat lump of domesticity by now," she laughed,
straightening her lithe limbs and resuming her conventional smile.
In a moment she had become the world's Betty again--bewitching, coy,
insouciante Betty.
But a tear-drop still clung to her eyelashes.