She advanced to within a few yards of the portrait and halted for a magnificent moment, confronting her painted self.
A young girl whispered excitedly:
“It is exactly like her! One knows not which is which!” Then she gave a little frightened shriek and shrank back into the crowd, for the Belletaille had turned on her like an angry tigress.
It is a curious fact that every one of us carries in his secret heart an image of himself totally different from the person that others see. The hardened portrait painter strives to approximate that image. But the portrait which Ventrillon, the novice, had painted was more like the Belletaille than was the Belletaille herself. For that great lady was, in every moment of her life, hard at work being something else. Perhaps that is the true cause of what followed, and perhaps it is not.
She collected herself. Opening her vanity case with splendid quick movements of those famous chalk-white hands, she took out a little ivory-handled manicure implement to do with it a thing for which it had not been designed.
She advanced upon the portrait, and with the gesture that she had until that moment reserved for slaying the baritone, slashed the tiny knife through and through the canvas until it dangled from the frame in twisting, slattern shreds. Then she turned to face her awestruck audience.
“The Belletaille is beautiful!” she cried in a sonorous middle voice. “None but the hand of time shall dare to deface her!”
Whereupon, with the magnificent walk of her second act of “Tosca,” she strode toward the door. As she reached it, Ventrillon was entering, his young cheeks hot, and his eyes shining with elated expectancy.
Those who saw the ensuing event were to boast of it afterward, and those who had not seen it were to pretend that they had.
“Pig!” she cried full in his face, and swinging high her parasol, broke it over the hat of eight reflections. Carrying the remains of the parasol with her, she stalked, always magnificent, into the street.