being which a woman can apply to
the realization of an art. A strange sensation, this double paternity,
this survival of genius as it abandons the man whose day is over to pass
into him who is at his dawn, like those beautiful, familiar birds which,
on the eve of a death, will desert the menaced roof to fly away to a
less mournful lodging.

During the last period of her father's life, Felicia--a great artist and
still a mere child--used to execute half of his works; and nothing was
more touching than this collaboration of father and daughter, in the
same studio, around the same group. The operation did not always proceed
peaceably; although her father's pupil, Felicia already felt her
own personality rebel against any despotic direction. She had those
audacities of the beginner, those intuitions of the future which are the
heritage of young talents, and, in opposition to the romantic traditions
of Sebastien Ruys, a tendency to modern realism, a need to plant that
glorious old flag upon some new monument.

These things were the occasion of terrible arguments, of discussions
from which the father came out beaten, conquered by his daughter's
logic, astonished at the progress made by the young, while the old, who
have opened the way for them, remain motionless at the point from which
they started. When she was working for him, Felicia would yield more
easily; but, where her own sculpture was concerned she was found to
be intractable. Thus the _Joueur de Boules_, her first exhibited work,
which obtained so great a success at the Salon of 1862, was the subject
of violent scenes between the two artists, of contradictions so strong,
that Jenkins had to intervene and help to secure the safety of the
plaster-cast which Ruys had threatened to destroy.

Apart from such little dramas, which in no way affected the tenderness
of their hearts, these two beings adored each other with the
presentiment and, gradually, the cruel certitude of an approaching
separation, when suddenly there occurred in Felicia's life a horrible
event. One day, Jenkins had taken her to dine at his house, as often
happened. Mme. Jenkins was away on a couple of days' visit, as also her
son; but the doctor's age, his semi-paternal intimacy, allowed him to
have with him, even in his wife's absence, this young girl whose fifteen
years, the fifteen years of an Eastern Jewess glorious in her precocious
beauty, left her still near childhood.

The dinner was very g