"Ah!" cries she, gayly, "you have come again at last. Please come in."
"No, no," replies Mascha, in great haste and excitement. "I cannot stay; I only wished to bring you the roses--for good-by."
"For good-by. How so?"
"Papa came yesterday, and----"
"You are going away with him." Nita completed the sentence. "Well, they are very beautiful, your roses, but still I will not accept them if you do not come in. You owe me a great many visits, little dove; come in," she urges, energetically.
One moment Mascha hesitates, then she accepts the invitation. "Only a moment," she murmurs. "I should like to see your studio once more, a last time, and your new picture. Colia said it is so beautiful."
"See! There it stands on the easel," says Nita, while she arranges the roses in a vase.
Mascha went up to the painting. It represented the corpse of a drowned girl, resting on a bier. Her garments drip with water, and so do the outstretched thin limbs, which make the impression of having been recently taken from the water. All this is painted with wonderfully bold truthfulness, but the charm of the face, the touchingly contented smile of the dead, reconciles the spectator with the painfulness of the subject.
"How did you think of it?" says Mascha, shuddering.
"I saw it in the morgue," explains Nita. "On a Sunday, shortly after the opening of the Salon, we were very gay, Nikolai, Sonia, and I. We went in the morgue, as if in defiance, but when I came out my heart was so full that I felt at once that I would make a picture of it. That is my way of ridding myself of an unpleasant impression."