t will
not pay you. Paint my flesh, my hair, my eyes,--they are good,--but do
not paint _me_."

He looked troubled.

"I am afraid my saying that sounded stilted," he returned. "I
explained myself poorly. It is not easy for me to explain myself
well."

"I understood," she said; "and I have warned you."

They did not speak to each other again during the whole sitting except
once, when he asked her if she was warm enough.

"I have a fire to-day," he said.

"Have you not always a fire?" she asked.

"No," he answered with a smile; "but when you come here there will
always be one."

"Then," she said, "I will come often, that I may save you from death."

"Oh!" he replied, "it is easier than you think to forget that one is
cold."

"Yes," she returned. "And it is easier than you think for one to die."

When she was going away, she made a movement toward the easel, but he
stopped her.

"Not yet," he said. "Not just yet."

She drew back.

"I have never cared to look at myself before," she said. "I do not
know why I should care now. Perhaps," with the laugh again, "it is
that I wish to see what you will make of _me_!"

Afterward, as she sat over her little porcelain stove in her room
below, she scarcely comprehended her own mood.

"He is not like the rest," she said. "He knows nothing of the world.
He is one of the good. He cares only for his art. How simple, and
kind, and pure! The little room is like a saint's cell." And then,
suddenly, she flung her arms out wearily, with a heavy sigh. "Ah,
_Dieu_!" she said, "how dull the day is! The skies are lead!"

A few days later she gave a sitting to an old artist whose name was
Masson, and she found that he had heard of what had happened.

"And so you sit to the American," he said.

"Yes."

"Well--and you find him--?"

"I find him," she repeated after him. "Shall I tell you what I find
him?"

"I shall listen with delight."

"I find him--a soul! You and I, my friend--and the rest of us--are
bodies; he is a soul!"

The artist began to whistle softly as he painted.

"It is dangerous work," he said at length, "for women to play with
souls."

"That is true," she answered, coldly.

The same day she went again to the room on the sixth floor. She again
sat through an hour of silence in which the American painted eagerly,
now and then stopping to regard her with searching eyes.

"But not as the rest regard me," she said to herself. "He forgets that
it is a