"After all," he said to Jacqueline, "it is of not much consequence; you will grow up to it some of these days. And I pay you my compliments in advance on your appearance in the future."
She felt like choking with rage. "Oh! is it right," she thought, "for parents to persist in keeping a young girl forever in her cradle, so to speak?"
CHAPTER IV
A DANGEROUS MODEL
Time passed too quickly to please Jacqueline. Her portrait was finished at last, notwithstanding the willingness Marien had shown—or so it seemed to her—to retouch it unnecessarily that she might again and again come back to his atelier. But it was done at last. She glided into that dear atelier for the last time, her heart big with regret, with no hope that she would ever again put on the fairy robe which had, she thought, transfigured her till she was no longer little Jacqueline.
"I want you only for one moment, and I need only your face," said Marien. "I want to change—a line—I hardly know what to call it, at the corner of your mouth. Your father is right; your mouth is too grave. Think of something amusing—of the Bal Blanc at Madame d'Etaples, or merely, if you like, of the satisfaction it will give you to be done with these everlasting sittings—to be no longer obliged to bear the burden of a secret, in short to get rid of your portrait-painter."
She made him no answer, not daring to trust her voice.
"Come! now, on the contrary you are tightening your lips," said Marien, continuing to play with her as a cat plays with a mouse—provided there ever was a cat who, while playing with its mouse, had no intention of crunching it. "You are not merry, you are sad. That is not at all becoming to you."
"Why do you attribute to me your own thoughts? It is you who will be glad to get rid of all this trouble."
Fraulein Schult, who, while patiently adding stitch after stitch to the long strip of her crochet-work, was often much amused by the dialogues between sitter and painter, pricked up her ears to hear what a Frenchman would say to what was evidently intended to provoke a compliment.