The picture is finished. She insisted on paying him for it, munificently, in the manner of queens.
“Oh, you have already paid me,” he said, with a tormented smile, refusing her offer.
Before he left, he secretly opened his portfolio, and let me look inside. I was startled. Her head looked at me as if out of a mirror and seemed actually to be alive.
“I shall take it along,” he said, “it is mine; she can’t take it away from me. I have earned it with my heart’s blood.”
* * * * *
“I am really rather sorry for the poor painter,” she said to me to-day, “it is absurd to be as virtuous as I am. Don’t you think so too?”
I did not dare to reply to her.
“Oh, I forgot that I am talking with a slave; I need some fresh air, I want to be diverted, I want to forget.
“The carriage, quick!”
Her new dress is extravagant: Russian half-boots of violet-blue velvet trimmed with ermine, and a skirt of the same material, decorated with narrow stripes and rosettes of furs. Above it is an appropriate, close-fitting jacket, also richly trimmed and lined with ermine. The headdress is a tall cap of ermine of the style of Catherine the Second, with a small aigrette, held in place by a diamond-agraffe; her red hair falls loose down her back. She ascends on the driver’s seat, and holds the reins herself; I take my seat behind. How she lashes on the horses! The carriage flies along like mad.