r work closely, and laid
the sock down and took up another.

"Such a man for wearing out socks. And always the heels," she remarked.
"It would try the patience of anyone!"

"Does it try even yours?" asked Brigit.

The little woman looked up, her shrewd black eyes twinkling under their
well-defined brows. "You have observed, then, that I am patient? But
yes, my dear, God help the wife of an artist if she is not! He is
terrible, my man, at times, but luckily I was born long-suffering. He
has, too, a way of wrenching at button-holes in collars that tears them
to bits, and desolates me."

"But----" began the girl, and then stopped.

All things considered, there was remarkably little constraint in her
feelings for this good woman, but somehow at that moment she wished to
change the subject.

Madame Joyselle, however, gave a gentle chuckle, and continued: "He was
his most terrific yesterday! Like a lion with no self-control; it was
very ridiculous."

Brigit started. Terrible, yes, but--it struck her as very unfitting for
the great man's plain little wife to find him ridiculous. And Felicite,
as her husband always called her, saw her start, and understood.

"Ah, yes, to you he is the great artist as well as Theo's
father--_hein_? To me he is, of course, just--my husband. All men are,
they say, different, but surely all husbands are much alike."

"There are certainly very few men like--_him_." Brigit took a sock out
of the basket and looked at it absently. There was a short silence,
during which Felicite did not speak, but she was watching her visitor in
the glass. Then she said suddenly, with a certain briskness in her
voice, "Shall I tell you about him? About my husband, you know, not
about the great artist of--all you others."

Brigit nodded. "Yes, please do. Tell me about--long ago, in Normandy."

"_Bien._ It will interest you. You like him very much, don't you?" she
added, suddenly, looking up and fixing the girl with her bright eyes.

"Like him? Indeed I do. I think him simply glorious," was the answer,
given in a gushing voice, but for a moment the girl felt vaguely uneasy.
During the last twelve weeks she had not, although seeing Joyselle's
wife every day, learned to regard her as a real factor in the game.
Joyselle, always tender and considerate of her, yet seemed to regard her
as a kind of cross between a mother and a nurse, and she, never
precisely retiring, and almost always present during Brigit's vis