political whip, reading piles of reports and newspapers and agricultural
treatises; and emerging for lunch with piles of letters in his hand, and
that odd puzzled look in his good healthy face, that deep gash between his
eyebrows, which my friend the mad-doctor calls the _maniac-frown_. It was
with this expression of face that I should have liked to paint him; but I
felt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him to
represent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and blond
conventionality. I was perhaps rather unconscientious about the likeness of
Mr. Oke; I felt satisfied to paint it no matter how, I mean as regards
character, for my whole mind was swallowed up in thinking how I should
paint Mrs. Oke, how I could best transport on to canvas that singular and
enigmatic personality. I began with her husband, and told her frankly that
I must have much longer to study her. Mr. Oke couldn't understand why it
should be necessary to make a hundred and one pencil-sketches of his wife
before even determining in what attitude to paint her; but I think he was
rather pleased to have an opportunity of keeping me at Okehurst; my
presence evidently broke the monotony of his life. Mrs. Oke seemed
perfectly indifferent to my staying, as she was perfectly indifferent to my
presence. Without being rude, I never saw a woman pay so little attention
to a guest; she would talk with me sometimes by the hour, or rather let me
talk to her, but she never seemed to be listening. She would lie back in a
big seventeenth-century armchair while I played the piano, with that
strange smile every now and then in her thin cheeks, that strange whiteness
in her eyes; but it seemed a matter of indifference whether my music
stopped or went on. In my portrait of her husband she did not take, or
pretend to take, the very faintest interest; but that was nothing to me. I
did not want Mrs. Oke to think me interesting; I merely wished to go on
studying her.

The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all aware of my presence