shall be forsaken?"

She asked why he did not make her bust, since he thought her beautiful.

"Why? Because I am an ordinary sculptor, and I know it; which is not the
faculty of an ordinary mind. But if you wish to think that I am a great
artist, I will give you other reasons. To create a figure that will
live, one must take the model like common material from which one will
extract the beauty, press it, crush it, and obtain its essence. There is
nothing in you that is not precious to me. If I made your bust I should
be servilely attached to these things which are everything to me because
they are something of you. I should stubbornly attach myself to the
details, and should not succeed in composing a finished figure."

She looked at him astonished.

He continued:

"From memory I might. I tried a pencil sketch." As she wished to see it,
he showed it to her. It was on an album leaf, a very simple sketch. She
did not recognize herself in it, and thought he had represented her with
a kind of soul that she did not have.

"Ah, is that the way in which you see me? Is that the way in which you
love me?"

He closed the album.

"No; this is only a note. But I think the note is just. It is probable
you do not see yourself exactly as I see you. Every human creature is a
different being for every one that looks at it."

He added, with a sort of gayety:

"In that sense one may say one woman never belonged to two men. That is
one of Paul Vence's ideas."

"I think it is true," said Therese.

It was seven o'clock. She said she must go. Every day she returned home
later. Her husband had noticed it. He had said: "We are the last to
arrive at all the dinners; there is a fatality about it!" But, detained
every day in the Chamber of Deputies, where the budget was being
discussed, and absorbed by the work of a subcommittee of which he was
the chairman, state reasons excused Therese's lack of punctuality. She
recalled smilingly a night when she had arrived at Madame Garain's at
half-past eight. She had feared to cause a scandal. But it was a day of
great affairs. Her husband came from the Chamber at nine o'clock only,
with Garain. They dined in morning dress. They had saved the Ministry.

Then she fell into a dream.

"When the Chamber shall be adjourned, my friend, I shall not have a
pretext to remain in Paris. My father does not understand my devotion to
my husband which makes me stay in Paris. In a week I shall have to go t