er its doors. The first entry
of Felicia into this almost monastic house caused indeed a certain
sensation; her dresses chosen by the Austrian dancer, her hair curling
to her waist, her gait free and easy like a boy's, aroused some
hostility, but she was a Parisian and could adapt herself quickly to
every situation and to all surroundings. A few days later, she looked
better than any one in the little black apron, to which the more
coquettish were wont to hang their watches, the straight skirt--a severe
and hard prescription at that period when fashion expanded women's
figures with an infinity of flounces--the regulation coiffure, two
plaits tied rather low, at the neck, after the manner of the Roman
peasants.

Strange to say, the regularity of the classes, their calm exactitude,
suited Felicia's nature, intelligent and quick, in which the taste
for study was relieved by a juvenile expansion at ease in the noisy
good-humour of playtime. She was popular. Among those daughters of
wealthy businessmen, of Parisian lawyers or of gentlemen-farmers, a
respectable and rather affectedly serious world, the well-known name
of old Ruys, the respect with which at Paris an artist's reputation is
surrounded, created for Felicia a greatly envied position, rendered more
brilliant still by her successes in the school-work, a genuine talent
for drawing, and her beauty, that superiority which asserts its
power even among young girls. In the wholesale atmosphere of the
boarding-school, she was conscious of an extreme pleasure as she grew
feminized, in resuming her sex, in learning to know order, regularity,
otherwise than these were taught by that amiable dancer whose kisses
seemed always to keep the taste of paint and her embraces somewhat
artificial in the curving of her arms. Ruys, her father, was enraptured
each time that he came to see his daughter, to find her more grown,
womanly, knowing how to enter, to walk, and to leave a room with that
pretty courtesy which caused all Mme. Belin's pupils to long for the
trailing rustle of a long skirt.

At first he came often, then, as he had not time enough for all his
commissions, accepted and undertaken, the advances on which went to pay
for the scrapes, the pleasures of his existence, he was seen more seldom
in the parlour. Finally, sickness intervened. Stricken by an incurable
anaemia, he would remain for weeks without leaving his house, without
doing any work. Thereupon he wished to have