“If you don’t stop trying to be such a grand lady, you’ll explode,” he said.

“Oh, shut up!” she said, before she caught herself.

“That’s better. Now close the door and let’s go to bed—”

“You know I can’t.” She was honestly scandalized. “If we’re going to get married, then it’s not right.”

“Good. We’ll go to bed and forget marriage.”

“You think I’m trapping you.”

“You? How could you trap me? I do only what I want to do!” he shouted.

She sat down next to him, averting her eyes, not yelling back at him as she used to do, and it worried him. She stuck her legs out in the air parallel to the bed, under her long skirts and petticoats, and wiggled her booted feet in small perfect circles. Her hands were in her lap. “That’s a pretty picture,” she said, looking at the courtyard scene.

“Say what’s on your mind,” Josef said, uneasily.

“You could go right inside that picture and walk to that yard or whatever it is, and no one would find us.” She giggled softly. “The picture’s big enough. We’d just disappear.”

He stared at her. “I didn’t know you had such an imagination. I didn’t know you liked that painting, either.” He paused. “Come on, let’s talk about something else,” he said. He didn’t know if he liked the idea of Bianka having imaginative qualities or not. He was growing more uncomfortable every minute. The room seemed to be waiting. It had an unreal clarity to it; extraordinary, he thought. If he could only duplicate those colors! The sunlight almost had a … texture: there were variations in transparency so that one moment he could see through it and the next moment it became heavier, though without any suggestion of weight … thicker, moving in golden columns of air.

“You look so funny,” Bianka said.

He turned and saw that the room’s transformation affected her also. The brown hair was an intricate thick and lovely webwork about her face. Her eyes seemed built up of deepening layers of color, not isolated but flowing one into the other—the pupils small pools sunken miraculously in the eyesockets. The cheeks cast rich purple shadows that echoed the firm jawline. The face was a living landscape—he saw it, filled with these soft hills and valleys of flesh, with Bianka’s moods illuminating it from within, flashing across it like clouds or sun emerge and disappear in the sky above the Earth.