Chapter 4

One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into
my studio a gentleman whom I had not yet seen but with whom I had
been very briefly in correspondence. A letter from him had
expressed to me some days before his regret on learning that my
"splendid portrait" of Miss Flora Louisa Saunt, whose full name
figured by her own wish in the catalogue of the exhibition of the
Academy, had found a purchaser before the close of the private
view. He took the liberty of inquiring whether I might have at his
service some other memorial of the same lovely head, some
preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had replied that
I had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he were
interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had
done. Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me,
stumbled into my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds--
a long, lean, confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion
and large protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure
the postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his
mouth I perceived, in addition to a remarkable revelation of gums,
that the text of the queer communication matched the registered
envelope. He was full of refinements and angles, of dreary and
distinguished knowledge. Of his unconscious drollery his dress
freely partook; it seemed, from the gold ring into which his red
necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his boots, to conform
with a high sense of modernness to the fashion before the last.
There were moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive
stammers and interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible;
but I felt him to be a gentleman and I liked the honesty of his
errand and the expression of his good green eyes.

As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty, however, he needed
explaining, especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my
brilliant model; had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as
he said, a tremendous fancy to her looks. I ought doubtless to
have been humiliated by the simplicity of his judgment of them, a
judgment for which the rendering was lost in the subject, quite
leaving out the element of art. He was like the innocent reader
for whom the story is "really true" and the author a negligible
quantity. He had come to me only because he wanted to purchase,
and I remember being so amused at his attitude, which I had never
seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked him why,
for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it wouldn't be more to the
point to deal directly with the lady. He stared and blushed at
this; the idea clearly alarmed him. He was an extraordinary case--
personally so modest that I could see