“Ah, Minerva, Minerva, I am very glad that you came this evening! But you must not leave me to myself for so long again, mind. I need to have near me an honest mind like yours, to see a true face among the masks that surround me. A fearful bourgeois, all the same,” she added, laughing, “and a provincial into the bargain. But no matter! It is you, for all that, whom it gives me the most pleasure to see. And I believe that my liking for you is due especially to one thing: you remind me of some one who was the great affection of my youth, a sedate and sensible little being she also, chained to the matter-of-fact side of existence, but tempering it with that ideal element which we artists set aside exclusively for the profit of our work. Certain things which you say seem to me as though they had come from her. You have the same mouth, like an antique model’s. Is it that that gives this resemblance to your words? I have no idea, but most certainly you are like each other. You shall see.”
On the table laden with sketches and albums, at which she was sitting facing him, she drew, as she talked, with brow inclined and her rather wild curly hair shading her graceful little head. She was no longer the beautiful couchant monster, with the anxious and gloomy countenance, condemning her own destiny, but a woman, a true woman, in love, and eager to beguile. This time Paul forgot all his mistrusts in presence of so much sincerity and such passing grace. He was about to speak, to persuade. The minute was decisive. But the door opened and the little page appeared. M. le Duc had sent to inquire whether mademoiselle was still suffering from her headache of earlier in the evening.
“Still just as much,” she said with irritation.
When the servant had gone out, a moment of silence fell between them, a glacial coldness. Paul had risen. She continued her sketch, with her head still bowed.
He took a few paces in the studio; then, having come back to the table, he asked quietly, astonished to feel himself so calm:
“It was the Duc de Mora who was to have dined here?”
“Yes. I was bored—a day of spleen. Days of that kind are bad for me.”
“Was the duchess to have come?”
“The duchess? No. I don’t know her.”
“Well, in your place I would never receive in my house, at my table, a married man whose wife I did not meet. You complain of being deserted; why desert yourself? When one is without reproach, one should avoid the very suspicion of it. Do I vex you?”