Rosselin watched her growth with pride. Her softened accent, her subdued gesture, her intelligent comprehension of intellectual things, her simple but picturesque clothing, were all due to his training or his suggestion. He had taken her to great libraries, famous galleries, historic palaces, and had taught her to understand the true and the false in art; he had taken her to recitals of the Conservatoire, and even to rehearsals at the great theatres, where, secured from observation, she could herself observe, and realised, as she listened, all the many traits and the many efforts which go together to make up admirable dramatic representation. He never allowed anyone to speak to her, scarcely to see her, but he gave her thus that training of the eye and of the ear without which no great artist can be created.
'Nature does much,' he said to her. 'Yes. But art is a different thing to nature. Art is three parts divine, but it is one part human, and that human part requires the most unwearied and elaborate training. The sculptor may bring a god out of the clay in the fire and the fever of his inspiration, but if he have not studied the laws of anatomy, the limbs of his god will be out of proportion, and one leg will be shorter than the other.'
In the artistic circles there went a whisper about that Rosselin had some paragon whom he was educating, and would produce some day; but every one feared the sarcastic power of the great artist's tongue too much to meddle, unasked, with his concerns, and Damaris, under his guidance, passed unmolested, almost unobserved, through the intricate mazes of that art-world, which she touched without entering it.
One day, when she had been taken to a recital at the Conservatoire, he had left her alone for a few moments; the recital was over, the pupils had left the stage; the professors were conversing together; from the floor there rose a cloud of dust, and from the hot, pent air a strong noisome odour. Her eyes ached, her temples throbbed; she, whose whole life had been passed in the fragrance of the open air, in the freshness of buoyant sea winds, felt stifled, stunned, nauseated. Fame itself seemed hateful, approached through this vitiated atmosphere. To pass your years in boxes of brick and stone, in cages of wood and iron, rather than in the glad freedom of glancing waters and unchecked movement over golden sands and flowering meadows, was it not madness indeed?
She remembered the words of Othmar, bidding her live the life that was led on the wide cornlands of La Beauce. All that was strong in her, and born to freedom, and filled with the love of the sea, and the joys of untrammelled movement through sunlit air, and against fruit-scented breezes, rose in nausea and revolt against the pent-up life of the artist in cities.
Where, oh where, was the open-air theatre of the Greeks, with no dome but the blue sky, and the voices of the chorus echoed by the sounds of the sea-waves breaking to surf upon the marble stairs?
'What are you thinking of? Your eyes look wild,' said Rosselin, rejoining her.
'I was thinking that I could never speak upon a covered stage: the air would choke me!'
Rosselin looked at her in silence. He himself was thinking of Aimée Desclée, of the bohémienne who had always wanted the fresh air, the free sunlight, the unpaid laughter, the unbought love.