I Want You Just as You Are The evening of that day after their return from the mountains, when Conrad Lagrange had found Aaron King so absorbed in his mother's letters, the artist continued in his silent, preoccupied, mood.

The next morning, it was the same.

Refusing every attempt of his friend to engage him in conversation, he answered only with absent-minded mono-syllables; until the novelist, declaring that the painter was fit company for neither beast nor man, left him alone; and went off somewhere with Czar.
The artist spent the greater part of the forenoon in his studio, doing nothing of importance.

That is, to a casual observer he would have _seemed_ to be doing nothing of importance.

He did, however, place his picture of the spring glade beside the portrait of Mrs.Taine, and then, for an hour or more, sat considering the two paintings.