“I would have you sit in a darkened room, the light source only from one place. Strong, but partial, so that it would fall across your face were it turned to the side…” He shakes his head and snatches off his hat, frustrated at his efforts to be clear, to make her see what he sees. His hair falls into his eyes and he pushes it back with a paint-stained hand. “The contrast should be heightened. A limited palette—browns, blacks, creams only. That way your eyes, well, they would shine with their own luminosity. As they do in life.” He becomes more animated, gesticulating with his hands as he speaks. “Your hair loose, of course, dark against your skin … not a nude, nothing like that, but bare shoulders, certainly. Pale. Very pale. Again the contrast, do you see? Do you see, Lilith?” He pauses, and then asks again, more quietly, reaching across the table to take her hands in his. “Do you see?” The sensation of her warm gloved fingers in his palms is easily as intoxicating to him as the brandy. He wants to keep this fragile connection. Slowly he lifts her hands and presses them to his lips, turning them over to kiss the soft, white-blue flesh of the underside of her wrists, the slender gap that he can just glimpse between the end of her leather gloves and the fur cuffs of her coat. She gives no answer to his question, but puts her head a little on one side as she watches him, and does not resist when he continues to clasp her hands in his own.

Perry is recounting an anecdote about Mangan letting a model get frostbite because she was made to sit for so long unclothed in his unheated studio. Charlotte laughs a little too brightly, and then calls for more brandy. Bram cannot bear the thought of their time together coming to an end so soon, so he simply lets Perry pour them each another measure from the pathetically small bottle that was intended for Mangan. He looks up at her and finds her staring back at him. He wishes more than anything that they could be alone together, for he knows she will not speak to him in the way she began to in the garden the other night so long as there are other people to hear what she has to say.

Whether or not she is aware of the extent of his inner turmoil he cannot tell, but he is certain she senses something of it. At last she casts her eyes down and, slowly, reluctantly, he likes to believe, withdraws her hands, setting them demurely in her lap. Charlotte and Perry are laughing loudly at a shared joke.