"Let us see, I am sure that you are feverish."
At the touch of that hand Felicia had a feeling of something very like repulsion.
"Let me alone—let me alone—your pearls can do nothing for me. When I am not working, I am bored, bored to death, so bored that I could kill myself; my ideas are of the color of that thick, brackish water flowing yonder. To be just at the beginning of life and to be disgusted with it! It's hard. I am reduced to the point of envying my poor Constance, who passes her days in her chair, never opening her mouth, but smiling all by herself at her memories of the past. I have not even that, not even any pleasant memories to recall. I have nothing but work—work!"
In Felicia's Studio
As she spoke, she worked fiercely, sometimes with the tool, sometimes with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time on a little sponge kept on the wooden frame on which the group stood; so that her complaints, her lamentations, inexplicable in a mouth of twenty years which had in repose the purity of a Grecian smile, seemed to be uttered at random, and addressed to no one in particular. And yet Jenkins seemed anxious and disturbed, notwithstanding the apparent interest he displayed in the artist's work, or rather in the artist herself, in the queenly grace of that mere girl, whose style of beauty seemed to have predestined her to the study of the plastic arts.
Annoyed by that admiring glance, which she felt like a weight, Felicia resumed:
"By the way, do you know that I saw your Nabob? He was pointed out to me at the Opera, Friday."
"Were you at the Opera, Friday?"
"Yes. The duke sent me his box."