Chapter 32 — the portrait; St. John refuses Rosamond

Jane has set up an easel in her cottage and has been painting in the long evenings. One day she paints a careful small portrait of Rosamond Oliver from memory — the bright eyes, the curls, the cheerful mouth. When St. John next visits, on parish business, she shows it to him. She is curious about how he will react.

He takes it from her hand. He looks at it for a long minute. He does not speak. He sits down with it on the table in front of him. Eventually Jane, who has decided she has nothing to lose, asks him directly whether he loves Rosamond Oliver. He composes his face. He answers with the calm flatness he uses for every difficult question: yes, he loves her, with all the passion a man of twenty-nine is capable of; he is fully alive to her beauty; he is also fully alive to her unfitness for the life he has decided to live. She would suffer in India; she would distract him; she would within five years regret the marriage. He has refused her, and intends to refuse her again. The principle, the conviction of his missionary call, is for him absolute.

Jane is shaken. She has not previously seen self-denial taken to this temperature in a man her own age. She also notices, with a small puzzlement the next chapter will explain, that as St. John is leaving — putting on his coat, picking up his hat — he glances down at the table where she has been writing and drawing, tears a small strip of paper from the sheet, and puts it in his pocket. She does not see what is on the strip. She does not ask. She will find out within a week why he wanted it.