It was not that she seemed secretive; but she was never very good at reporting small talk, and things that happened outside of the family circle, even if they happened to herself, always seemed of secondary interest to her. And meanwhile the sittings went on and on. In spite of his free style Svengaart was a slow worker; and he seemed to find Nadeja a difficult subject. Targatt began to brood over the situation: some people thought the fellow handsome, in the lean grey-hound style; and he had an easy cosmopolitan way—the European manner. It was what Nadeja was used to; would she suddenly feel that she had missed something during all these years? Targatt turned cold at the thought. It had never before occurred to him what a humdrum figure he was. The contemplation of his face in the shaving-glass became so distasteful to him that he averted his eyes, and nearly cut his throat in consequence. Nothing of the grey-hound style about him—or the Viking either.

            Slowly, as these thoughts revolved in his mind, he began to feel that he, who had had everything from Nadeja, had given her little or nothing in return. What he had done for her people weighed as nothing in this revaluation of their past. The point was: what sort of a life had he given Nadeja? And the answer: No life at all! She had spent her best years looking after other people; he could not remember that she had ever asserted a claim or resented an oversight. And yet she was neither dull nor insipid: she was simply Nadeja—a creature endlessly tolerant, totally unprejudiced, sublimely generous and unselfish.

            Well—it would be funny, Targatt thought, with a twist of almost physical pain, if nobody else had been struck by such unusual qualities. If it had taken him over ten years to find them out, others might have been less blind. He had never noticed her “lines”, for instance; yet that painter fellow, the moment he’d clapped eyes on her—!

            Targatt sat in his study, twisting about restlessly in his chair. Where was Nadeja, he wondered? The winter dusk had fallen, and painters do not work without daylight. The day’s sitting must be over—and yet she had not come back. Usually she was always there to greet him on his return from the office. She had taught him to enjoy his afternoon tea, with a tiny caviar sandwich and a slice of lemon, and the samovar was already murmuring by the fire. When she went to see any of her family she always called up to say if she would be late; but the maid said there had been no message from her.

            Targatt got up and walked the floor impatiently; then he sat down again, lit a cigarette, and threw it away. Nadeja, he remembered, had not been in the least shocked when Katinka had decided to live with Mr. Bellamy; she had merely wondered if the step were expedient, and had finally agreed with Katinka that it was. Nor had Boris’s matrimonial manoeuvres seemed to offend her. She was entirely destitute of moral indignation; this painful reality was now borne in on Targatt for the first time. Cruelty shocked her; but otherwise she seemed to think that people should do as they pleased. Yet, all the while, had she ever done what she pleased? There was the torturing enigma! She seemed to allow such latitude to others, yet to ask so little for herself.

            Well, but didn’t the psychologist fellows say that there was an hour in every woman’s life—every self-sacrificing woman’s—when the claims of her suppressed self suddenly asserted themselves, body and soul, and she forgot everything else, all her duties, ties, responsibilities? Targatt broke off with a bitter laugh. What did “duties, ties, responsibilities” mean to Nadeja? No more than to any of the other Kouradjines. Their vocabulary had no parallels with his. He felt a sudden overwhelming loneliness, as if all these years he had been married to a changeling, an opalescent creature swimming up out of the sea…

            No, she couldn’t be at the studio any longer; or if she were, it wasn’t to sit for her portrait. Curse the portrait, he thought—why had he ever consented to her sitting to Svengaart? Sheer cupidity; the snobbish ambition to own a Svengaart, the glee of getting one for nothing. The more he proceeded with this self-investigation the less he cared for the figure he cut. But however poor a part he had played so far, he wasn’t going to add to it the role of the duped husband…

            “Damn it, I’ll go round there myself and see,” he muttered, squaring his shoulders, and walking resolutely across the room to the door. But as he reached the entrance-hall the faint click of a latchkey greeted him; and sweeter music he had never heard. Nadeja stood in the doorway, pale but smiling. “Jim—you were not going out again?”

            He gave a sheepish laugh. “Do you know what time it is? I was getting scared.”

            “Scared for me?” She smiled again. “Dear me, yes! It’s nearly dinner-time, isn’t it?”

            He followed her into the drawing-room and shut the door.