"I cannot believe it," she said, "else why, when you have facility, talent, and might employ them on a higher subject, do you paint a mere study of a vain young lady?"
This interpretation of Manon startled me, so lacking was it in comprehension.
"Manon Lescaut was more than a vain young lady, Miss Jones."
"Well," Miss Jones lifted her eyes for a moment to smile quietly, soothingly at me. "I am not imputing any wrong to Miss Manon Lescaut; I merely say that she is vain. A harmless vanity no doubt, but I have posed for other characters, you see!" Her smile was so charming in its very fatuity that the vision of her lovely face, vulgarized and unrecognizable in "Faith Conquers Fear," filled me with redoubled exasperation. Her misinterpretation of Manon stirred a certain deepening of that touch of discomfort--a sickly unpleasantness. I found myself flushing.
Miss Jones's white hand--the hand that held the mirror with such beauty in taper finger-tips and turn of wrist--fell to her side, and she fixed her eyes on me with quite a troubled look.
"I am afraid I have hurt your feelings," she said; "I am very sorry. I always speak my mind out; I never think that it may hurt. It is very dull in me."
At these words I felt that unpleasant stir spring suddenly to a guilty misery. I felt, somehow, that I was a shameful hypocrite, and Miss Jones a priggish but most charming and most injured angel.
"Miss Jones," I said, much confused, "sincerity cannot really hurt me, and I always respect it. I am sorry, very sorry, that you see no more in my picture. I care for your good opinion" (this was certainly, in a sense, a lie, and yet, for the moment, that guilty consciousness upon me, I believed it), "and I hope that though my picture has not gained it, I, personally, may never forfeit it."
Still looking at me gravely, Miss Jones said:
"I don't think you ever will. That is a very manly, a very noble way of looking at it."
But the thought of Manon Lescaut now tormented me. I had finished the head; my preoccupation could not harm that; but this lovely face looking into the mirror, with soulless, happy eyes, seemed to slide a smile at me, a smile of malicious comprehension, a smile of _nous nous entendons_, a smile that made a butt of Miss Jones's innocence and laughed with me at the joke.