But the master begged her impatiently. She must put them all on; his painting demanded it. The long silence of the girl proved that she was complying, putting on these old garments, overcoming her repugnance.
When she came out of the room she smiled with a sort of pity, as if she were laughing at herself. Renovales drew back, stirred by his own work, bewildered, feeling his temples throbbing, fancying that the pictures and furniture were whirling about him.
Poor "Fregolina"! What a delightful clown! She felt like laughing at the thought of the storm of cries which would burst out in her theater if she should appear on the stage dressed in this fashion, of the jests of her friends if she should come into one of their dinners in these clothes of twenty years ago. She did not know these styles, and to her they seemed to belong to a remote antiquity. The master leaned over the back of a chair.
"Josephina! Josephina!"
It was she, such as he kept her in his memory—as she was that happy summer in the Roman mountains, in her pink dress and that rustic hat which gave her the dainty air of a village girl in the opera. Those fashions at which the younger generation laughed were for him the most beautiful, the most artistic that feminine taste had ever produced; they recalled the spring of his life.
"Josephina! Josephina!"
He remained silent, for these exclamations were born and died in his thoughts. He did not dare to move or speak, for fear this apparition of his dreams would vanish. She, smiling, was delighted at the effect her appearance had on the painter and seeing her reflection in a distant mirror, recognized that in this strange costume she did not look at all badly.
"Where shall I go? Sitting or standing?"
The master could hardly speak; his voice was hoarse, labored.
She could pose as she wished. And she sat down in a chair adopting a posture which she considered very graceful—her cheek on one hand, her legs crossed, just as she was wont to sit in the green room of the theater, showing a bit of open-work pink silk stocking under her skirt. That too reminded the painter of the other.