isting them between her fingers.

In spite of the somewhat depressing effect of her worn garments, she
displayed a natural elegance, a perfect form and graceful movements, and
Guy, accustomed as he was to estimate at a glance the material condition
of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment. She whom he
had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a
life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now
burned out like an exploded rocket.

Marianne Kayser!

Of all the women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most
sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, passionate and half-mad.
She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of
restraint. Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too
rebellious to accept the humiliations of destiny.

She was an orphan, and had been brought up by her uncle, Simon Kayser, a
serious painter, indifferent to all that did not concern his art,--its
morality, its dignity, its superiority--who had, under cover of his own
ignorance, allowed the ardent dreams of his niece and her wayward fits
to develop freely like poisonous plants; near this man, in the vicious
atmosphere of an old bachelor's disorderly household, Marianne had lived
the bitter life of a young woman out of her element, poor, but with
every instinct unswervingly leaning towards the enjoyments of luxury.

She had grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and,
as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes. A little creature, she
served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed
her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten. Moreover, the
child lighted his stove and filled his pipe.

The studio was littered with books. As chance offered, she read them all
eagerly and examined with curiosity the pictures drawn by an Eisen or a
Moreau, depicting passionate kisses exchanged under arbors, where
behind curtains, short silk skirts appeared in a rumpled state. She had
rapidly reached womanhood without Kayser's perceiving that she could
comprehend and judge for herself.

This falsely inspired man, entirely devoted to mystical compositions,
vaguely painted--philosophical and critical, as he said--this thinker,
whose brush painted obscure subjects as it might have produced signs,
did not dream that the girl growing up beside him was also in love with
chimeras, and drawn toward the abyss