We did not ask in the attic.
Summer was nigh at hand, and we loved one another.
René had come to us—we had not gone to him. For our garret was on the sunny, his on the dark, side of the street, and Lili feared the gloom for me and the bird; and she could not bring herself to leave that old red-leaved creeper who had wound himself so close about the rainpipe and the roof, and who could not have been dislodged without being slain.
With the Mardi Gras her trade had returned to her. René, unable to prosecute his grand works, took many of the little boxes in his own hands, and wrought on them with all the nameless mystical charm and the exquisite grace of touch which belong to the man who is by nature a great artist. The little trade could not at its best price bring much, but it brought bread; and we were happy.
While he worked at the box lids she had leisure for her household labors; when these were done she would draw out her mother’s old Breton distaff, and would sit and spin. When twilight fell they would go forth together to dream under the dewy avenues and the glistening stars, or as often would wait within whilst he played on his mountain flute to the people at the doorways in the street below.
“Is it better to go out and see the stars and the leaves ourselves, or to stay indoors and make all these forget the misfortune of not seeing them?” said Lili on one of those evenings when the warmth and the sunset almost allured her to draw the flute from her husband’s hands and give him his hat instead; and then she looked down into the narrow road, at the opposite houses, at the sewing-girls stitching by their little windows, at the pale students studying their sickly lore with scalpel and with skeleton, at the hot, dusty little children at play on the asphalt sidewalk, at the sorrowful, darkened casements behind which she knew beds of sickness or of paralyzed old age were hidden—looked at all this from behind my blossoms, and then gave up the open air and the evening stroll that were so dear a pastime to her, and whispered to René, “Play, or they will be disappointed.”
And he played, instead of going to the debating-club in the room round the corner.
“He has ceased to be a patriot,” grumbled the old vine. “It is always so with every man when once he has loved a woman!”
Myself, I could not see that there was less patriotism in breathing the poetry of sound into the ears of his neighbors than in rousing the passions of hell in the breasts of his brethren.
But perhaps this was my ignorance: I believe that of late years people have grown to hold that the only pure patriotism is, and ought to be, evinced in the most intense and the most brutalized form of one passion,—“Envy, eldest-born of hell.”