just in the light
it should be.' He seemed to her so good-natured, and she was so fond of
him, that after finding excuses for him for daubing those horrors, she
ended by discovering qualities in them in order that she might like them
a little also.

Nevertheless, there was one picture, the large one, the one intended for
the Salon, to which for a long while she was quite unable to reconcile
herself. She already looked without dislike at the studies made at the
Boutin studio and the sketches of Plassans, but she was still irritated
by the sight of the woman lying in the grass. It was like a personal
grudge, the shame of having momentarily thought that she could detect
in it a likeness of herself, and silent embarrassment, too, for that big
figure continued to wound her feelings, although she now found less and
less of a resemblance in it. At first she had protested by averting her
eyes. Now she remained for several minutes looking at it fixedly,
in mute contemplation. How was it that the likeness to herself had
disappeared? The more vigorously that Claude struggled on, never
satisfied, touching up the same bit a hundred times over, the more did
that likeness to herself gradually fade away. And, without being able
to account for it, without daring to admit as much to herself, she, whom
the painting had so greatly offended when she had first seen it, now
felt a growing sorrow at noticing that nothing of herself remained.

Indeed it seemed to her as if their friendship suffered from this
obliteration; she felt herself further away from him as trait after
trait vanished. Didn't he care for her that he thus allowed her to be
effaced from his work? And who was the new woman, whose was the unknown
indistinct face that appeared from beneath hers?

Claude, in despair at having spoilt the figure's head, did not know
exactly how to ask her for a few hours' sitting. She would merely have
had to sit down, and he would only have taken some hints. But he had
previously seen her so pained that he felt afraid of irritating her
again. Moreover, after resolving in his own mind to ask her this favour
in a gay, off-hand way, he had been at a loss for words, feeling all at
once ashamed at the notion.

One afternoon he quite upset her by one of those bursts of anger which
he found it impossible to control, even in her presence. Everything had
gone wrong that week; he talked of scraping his canvas again, and he
paced up and down, beside him