"Oh, leave me," she cried, repulsing him in horror. "I despise more than I hate you. This year and more you have been lying to me. God is punishing me cruelly for the love I felt for you. You were here hour after hour while, watching over our child, my thoughts were yours alone and wholly. The happiness I tried to give you was insufficient; you must have other tendernesses than mine. With me inspiration failed you; another woman's kisses could restore it."
As she spoke in a quick, broken voice, Lise was pacing up and down the studio. Her excitement grew with every word. Her open mantle allowed a glimpse of the slight costume under which her heart was beating as if it would break.
Thus she came before the picture which represented the daughter of the Ptolemies under the form and features of Sarah; and she exclaimed as much in grief as in wounded pride:
"I, too, once posed nude before you. My love urged me to that shamefullness. Well, then, Monsieur Paul Meyrin, do you need only girls of her sort as models? Am not I beautiful enough to serve your purpose? Come, take your brush; go on with your work."
Flinging away her furred mantle, tearing open with trembling hands her silken dressing-gown, loosening with a movement of the head her luxuriant hair which fell in a golden flood over her shoulders, Lise Barineff sprung toward the couch that Sarah Lamber had occupied a few minutes ago.
Then, when she had reached it, she added, superb and quivering, fixing with her steely look the husband who stood dumb, motionless and overcome:
"Well! I am waiting."
But the unhappy woman was at the end of her strength, for, suddenly, with a cry of agony she bent backward and fell senseless to the ground.
Paul rushed toward her, took her in his arms, and through a feeling of delicacy surprising enough in him, carried her to a sofa instead of laying her on the couch used by the model.
In a few minutes Mme. Meyrin regained her senses and, recalling what had just passed, she seemed to have quite regained her calmness. She knotted up her hair, wrapped herself in her mantle, and said to her husband, who was hanging eagerly about her and wished to oppose her going: