“Allons, mes amis ... mais calmez-vous donc!” exclaimed Blanche Aubriot at his elbow.
François looked down at her white shoulders, and experienced a momentary feeling of repugnance which passed into self-ridicule, for glancing at her indolent brown eyes soft as velvet, at her full red lips, at her glossy hair, he acknowledged her beauty.
“Come and talk to me, Monsieur René,” she urged with the insistence of a spoilt child. “You’re a great man, I know, but the lion condescends to the mouse sometimes, doesn’t he?”
François followed them with his eyes as they moved away together.
“If she had said cat, I should have found no difficulty in reversing the parts,” was his inward reflection.
The fire had died down, but as he sat before the smouldering ashes, François was very far in space and time from the club bedroom in which he was dreaming.
He was passing through successive stages of satisfaction and despair, hope and baffling discouragement, while he painted Anne’s portrait. After the first fortnight, she came every day, and every day she was more silent.
He remembered this afterwards. At the time, engrossed heart and soul in his picture, he did not notice her quietude. He was only half consciously perplexed by a subtle difference in her expression which he found hard to reconcile with his previous impression of her—a difference which was at once his inspiration, and his despair.
“If only I can get that, I shall paint a great picture!” he exclaimed one day involuntarily, breaking a long silence.