"Oh, no, you are very strong! So is a lioness; but she dies of a man's wound sometimes. He has been very base to you."
"He has done as he thought it right to do. Who shall lay blame on him for that?"
"Your loyalty says so; you are very brave, no doubt. But tell me, do you still wish this man, who wounds you so cruelly, set free?"
"Yes."
"What, still?"
"Why not?"
"Why not? Only this: that once he is let loose your very memory will be shaken from his thoughts as the dust of the summer, to which you liken yourself, is shaken from his feet!"
"No doubt."
She thought she did not let him see the agony he dealt her; she stood unflinching, her hands crossed upon her breast, her head drooped, her eyes looking far from him to where the fading sunlight gleamed still upon the reaches of the river.
"No doubt," he echoed. "And yet I think you hardly understand. This man is a great artist. He has a great destiny, if he once can gain the eye and the ear of the world. The world will fear him, and curse him always; he is very merciless to it; but if he once conquer fame, that fame will be one to last as long as the earth lasts. That I believe. Well, give this man what he longs for and strives for, a life in his fame which shall not die so long as men have breath to speak of art. What will you be in that great drunken dream of his, if once we make it true for him? Not even a remembrance, Folle-Farine. For though you have fancied that you, by your beauty, would at least abide upon his canvas, and so go on to immortality with his works and name, you seem not to know that so much also will do any mime who lets herself for hire on a tavern stage, or any starveling who makes her daily bread by giving her face and form to a painter's gaze. Child! what you have thought noble, men and women have decreed one of the vilest means by which a creature traffics in her charms. The first lithe-limbed model that he finds in the cities will displace you on his canvas and in his memory. Shall he go free—to forget you?"