Finally, he gave a
whole day to the thing, and made an admirable sketch.
After that Kendal felt free to make the most of his
opportunities of seeing Elfrida--his irritation with her
subsided, her blunder had been settled to his satisfaction.
He had an obscure idea of having inflicted discipline
upon her in giving the incident form and color upon
canvas, in arresting its grotesqueness and sounding its
true _motif_ with a pictorial tongue. It was his conception
of the girl that he punished, and he let his fascinated
speculation go out to her afterward at a redoubled rate.
She brought him sometimes to the verge of approval, to
the edge of liking; arid when he found that he could not
take the further step he told himself impatiently that
it was not a case for anything so ordinary as approval,
or anything so personal as liking; it was a matter of
observation, enjoyment, stimulus. He availed himself of
these abstractions with a candor that was the more open
for not being complicated with any less hardy motive. He
had long ago decided that relations of sentiment with
Elfrida would require a temperament quite different from
that of any man he knew. It was entirely otherwise with
Janet Cardiff, and Kendal smiled as he thought of the
feminine variation the two girls illustrated.
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