Several times in the course of their acquaintance she had cheapened or humiliated him in his own eyes; and the sensation had been of a sharpness as yet unknown to him.
Of course, there was in it, one way or another, an aristocratic insolence! There must be: to move so delicately and immaculately through life, with such superfine perceptions, must mean that you were brought up to scorn the common way, and those who walk in it.

'The poor in a lump are bad'-- coarse and ill-mannered at any rate--that must be the real meaning of her soft dignity, so friendly yet so remote, her impossibly ethereal standards, her light words that so often abashed a man for no reasonable cause.
She had been sitting to him, off and on, for about six weeks.
Originally she had meant him to make a three-hour sketch of her.

He triumphed in the remembrance that she and Lord Findon had found the sketch so remarkable that, when he had timidly proposed a portrait in oils, Lord Findon himself had persuaded her to sit.

Since that moment his work on the portrait, immediately begun, had absorbed him to such a degree that the 'Genius Loci,' still unfinished, had been put aside, and must have its last touches when he returned to town.
But in the middle of the sittings, Madame de Pastourelles being away, and he in a mood to destroy all that he had done, he had suddenly spent a stray earning on a railway ticket to Paris.
There--excitement!--illumination!--and a whole fresh growth of ambition! Some of the mid-century portraits in the Luxembourg, and in a loan exhibition then open in the Rue Royale, excited him so that he lost sleep and appetite.

The work of Bastien-Lepage was also to be seen; and the air rang with the cries of Impressionism.