r husband at all hours, free from the anxiety that filled
her, when he was working in his studio. For a month Renovales remained
in placid idleness. His art seemed forgotten; the boxes of paints, the
easels, all the artistic luggage brought from Rome, remained packed up
and forgotten in a shed in the garden. Afternoons they took long walks,
returning home at nightfall slowly, with their arms around each other's
waists, watching the strip of pale gold in the western sky, breaking the
rural silence with one of the sweet, passionate romances that came from
Naples. Now that they were alone in the intimacy of a life without cares
or friendships, the enthusiastic love of the first days of their married
life reawakened. But the "demon of painting" was not long in spreading
over him his invisible wings, which seemed to scatter an irresistible
enchantment. He became bored at the long hours in the bright sun, yawned
in his wicker chair, smoking pipe after pipe, not knowing what to talk
about. Josephina, on her part, tried to drive away the ennui by reading
some English novel of aristocratic life, tiresome and moral, to which
she had taken a great liking in her school girl days.

Renovales began to work again. His servant brought out his artist's kit
and he took up his palette as enthusiastically as a beginner, and
painted for himself with a religious fervor as if he thought to purify
himself from that base submission to the commissions of a dealer.

He studied Nature directly; painted delightful bits of landscapes,
tanned and repulsive heads that breathed the selfish brutality of the
peasant. But this artistic activity did not seem to satisfy him. His
life of increased intimacy with Josephina aroused in him mysterious
longings that he hardly dared to formulate. Mornings when his wife,
fresh and rosy from her bath, appeared before him almost naked, he
looked at her with greedy eyes.

"Oh, if you were only willing! If you didn't have that foolish prejudice
of yours!"

And his exclamations made her smile, for her feminine vanity was
flattered by this worship. Renovales regretted that his artistic talent
had to go in search of beautiful things when the supreme, definitive
work was at his side. He told her about Rubens, the great master, who
surrounded Elene Froment with the luxury of a princess, and of her who
felt no objection to freeing her fresh, mythological beauty from veils
in order to serve as a model for her husband. Renov