She had just taken off her suède gloves with a jerky movement and was abstractedly twisting them between her fingers.
In spite of the somewhat depressing effect of her worn garments, she displayed a natural elegance, a perfect form and graceful movements, and Guy, accustomed as he was to estimate at a glance the material condition of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment. She whom he had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now burned out like an exploded rocket.
Of all the women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, passionate and half-mad. She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of restraint. Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too rebellious to accept the humiliations of destiny.
She was an orphan, and had been brought up by her uncle, Simon Kayser, a serious painter, indifferent to all that did not concern his art,—its morality, its dignity, its superiority—who had, under cover of his own ignorance, allowed the ardent dreams of his niece and her wayward fits to develop freely like poisonous plants; near this man, in the vicious atmosphere of an old bachelor's disorderly household, Marianne had lived the bitter life of a young woman out of her element, poor, but with every instinct unswervingly leaning towards the enjoyments of luxury.
She had grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and, as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes. A little creature, she served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten. Moreover, the child lighted his stove and filled his pipe.
The studio was littered with books. As chance offered, she read them all eagerly and examined with curiosity the pictures drawn by an Eisen or a Moreau, depicting passionate kisses exchanged under arbors, where behind curtains, short silk skirts appeared in a rumpled state. She had rapidly reached womanhood without Kayser's perceiving that she could comprehend and judge for herself.
This falsely inspired man, entirely devoted to mystical compositions, vaguely painted—philosophical and critical, as he said—this thinker, whose brush painted obscure subjects as it might have produced signs, did not dream that the girl growing up beside him was also in love with chimeras, and drawn toward the abyss, not however to learn the mysteries hidden by the clouds, but the mystery of life, the secret of the visions that haunted her, of the disquieting temptations that filled her with such feverish excitement.
If Uncle Kayser could for one moment have descended from the nebulous regions, and touched the earth, he would have found an impatient ardor in the depth of Marianne's glance, and something feverish and restless in her movements. But this huge, ruddy, rotund man, speaking above his rounded stomach, cared only for the morality of art, æsthetic dignity, and the necessity of raising the standard of art, of creating a mission for it, an end, an idea—art the educator, art the moralizer,—and allowed this feverish, wearied, impulsive creature, moulded by vice, who bore his name, to wander around his studio like a stray dog.
Isolated, forgotten, the young girl sometimes passed whole days bending over a book, her lips dry, her face pale, but with a burning light in her gray eyes, while her fingers were thrust through her hair, or she rested upon a window-sill, following afar off, some imaginary picture in the depths of the clouds.