rket for holy wares is bad, and, dash it, I've had
to tighten my belt! Look, in the meanwhile, I'm reduced to this.'

He thereupon took the linen wraps off a bust, showing a long face still
further elongated by whiskers, a face full of conceit and infinite
imbecility.

'It's an advocate who lives near by. Doesn't he look repugnant, eh? And
the way he worries me about being very careful with his mouth. However,
a fellow must eat, mustn't he?'

He certainly had an idea for the Salon; an upright figure, a girl about
to bathe, dipping her foot in the water, and shivering at its freshness
with that slight shiver that renders a woman so adorable. He showed
Claude a little model of it, which was already cracking, and the painter
looked at it in silence, surprised and displeased at certain concessions
he noticed in it: a sprouting of prettiness from beneath a persistent
exaggeration of form, a natural desire to please, blended with a
lingering tendency to the colossal. However, Mahoudeau began lamenting;
an upright figure was no end of a job. He would want iron braces that
cost money, and a modelling frame, which he had not got; in fact, a lot
of appliances. So he would, no doubt, decide to model the figure in a
recumbent attitude beside the water.

'Well, what do you say--what do you think of it?' he asked.

'Not bad,' answered the painter at last. 'A little bit sentimental, in
spite of the strapping limbs; but it'll all depend upon the execution.
And put her upright, old man; upright, for there would be nothing in it
otherwise.'

The stove was roaring, and Chaine, still mute, rose up. He prowled about
for a minute, entered the dark back shop, where stood the bed that he
shared with Mahoudeau, and then reappeared, his hat on his head, but
more silent, it seemed, than ever. With his awkward peasant fingers he
leisurely took up a stick of charcoal and then wrote on the wall: 'I
am going to buy some tobacco; put some more coals in the stove.' And
forthwith he went out.

Claude, who had watched him writing, turned to the other in amazement.

'What's up?'

'We no longer speak to one another; we write,' said the sculptor,
quietly.

'Since when?'

'Since three months ago.'

'And you sleep together?'

'Yes.'

Claude burst out laughing. Ah! dash it all! they must have hard nuts.
But what was the reason of this falling-out? Then Mahoudeau vented his
rage against that brute of a Chaine! Hadn't he, one night on coming h