Jenkins changed color.
"I persuaded Constance to go with me. It was the first time in twenty years, since her farewell performance, that she had entered the Opera. It made a great impression on her. During the ballet especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her former triumphs sparkled in her eyes. How fortunate one is to have such emotions. A perfect type of his class, that Nabob. You must bring him to see me. It would amuse me to do his head."
"What! why he is frightful! You can't have had a good look at him."
"Indeed I did, on the contrary. He was opposite us. That white Ethiopian visage would be superb in marble. And not commonplace, at all events. Moreover, if he's so ugly as all that, you won't be so unhappy as you were last year when I was doing Mora's bust. What a wicked face you had at that time, Jenkins!"
"Not for ten years of life," muttered Jenkins in a threatening voice, "would I go through those hours again. But it amuses you to see people suffer."
"You know very well that nothing amuses me," she said, shrugging her shoulders with supreme impertinence.
Then, without looking at him, without another word, she plunged into one of those periods of intense activity by means of which true artists escape from themselves and all their surroundings.
Jenkins took a few hurried steps, deeply moved, his lip swollen with avowals that dared not come forth, and began two or three sentences that met with no reply; at last, feeling that he was dismissed, he took his hat and walked toward the door.
"It's understood then, is it? I am to bring him here?"
"Who, pray?"