So tamely I pictured my first love. And the gay old city of Paris smiled, and in that bantering way of hers she brought to me in a café one night a perfect young tigress of a girl, a lithe, dusky beauty with smouldering eyes, and said:
"Without doubt this one is better for you. Regard what loveliness, what fire! Oh, my son, why not be brave?"
I was not brave, I barely spoke, and my friend the little Hungarian Jew who had brought her to my table was forced to do the talking. For she, too, was silent. But how different was her silence from the quiet I had pictured. Presently, however, I became a little easier, and by degrees we began to talk. She told me she was a painter. An Armenian by birth, she had run away from home at eighteen, and here for two years in Julien's she had tried to paint till she felt she'd go mad. She talked in abrupt, eager sentences, breaking off to watch people around us. How her big eyes fastened upon them. "To watch faces until you are sure—and then paint! There is nothing else in the world!" she said. And I found this reassuring.
After that I saw her many nights. And from time to time breaking that silence of hers, she became so fiercely confiding, not only about her painting, but about what she called her innermost soul, that soon I could look my De Maupassant square in the face, man to man, for I was learning a lot about women. As yet we were friends and nothing more, but I could feel both of us changing fast. "In a little while," I thought.
But alas. One night she took me up to her room and showed me her paintings. They were bad. They were fearfully bad, and my face must have shown the impression they made.
"You consider them frightful!" she exclaimed. I stoutly denied it, but things only went from bad to worse. Here was that temperament I had dreaded. Now she was clutching both my arms.
"Mon dieu! Why not say it? Why cannot you say it?"
"No," I replied. "You have done some extremely powerful work!" Anything to quiet her nerves. "Especially this one—look—over here!" And I pointed to one of her pictures.
"I will show you how I shall look at it!" she cried in a perfect frenzy of tears. She snatched up a knife that lay on her table, a very old, curved, Armenian knife, and went at the painting and slashed it to shreds, and then scattered the shreds all over the room.
And watching this little festival, I thought to myself excitedly,