4


From that moment I began to assume a certain interest in the eyes of Mrs.
Oke; or rather, I began to perceive that I had a means of securing her
attention. Perhaps it was wrong of me to do so; and I have often reproached
myself very seriously later on. But after all, how was I to guess that I
was making mischief merely by chiming in, for the sake of the portrait I
had undertaken, and of a very harmless psychological mania, with what was
merely the fad, the little romantic affectation or eccentricity, of a
scatter-brained and eccentric young woman? How in the world should I have
dreamed that I was handling explosive substances? A man is surely not
responsible if the people with whom he is forced to deal, and whom he deals
with as with all the rest of the world, are quite different from all other
human creatures.

So, if indeed I did at all conduce to mischief, I really cannot blame
myself. I had met in Mrs. Oke an almost unique subject for a
portrait-painter of my particular sort, and a most singular, _bizarre_
personality. I could not possibly do my subject justice so long as I was
kept at a distance, prevented from studying the real character of the
woman. I required to put her into play. And I ask you whether any more
innocent way of doing so could be found than talking to a woman, and
letting her talk, about an absurd fancy she had for a couple of ancestors
of hers of the time of Charles I., and a poet whom they had
murdered?--particularly as I studiously respected the prejudices of my
host, and refrained from mentioning the matter, and tried to restrain Mrs.
Oke from doing so, in the presence of William Oke himself.