this unexpected harshness; then he
understood, and murmured:

"I shall obey, Madame."

"Very well," she rejoined; "I expected that of you! Now work, for you
are long in finishing that portrait."

He took up his palette and began to paint, but his hand trembled, his
troubled eyes looked without seeing; he felt a desire to weep, so deeply
wounded was his heart.

He tried to talk to her; she barely answered him. When he attempted to
pay her some little compliment on her color, she cut him short in a tone
so brusque that he felt suddenly one of those furies of a lover that
change tenderness to hatred. Through soul and body he felt a nervous
shock, and in a moment he detested her. Yes, yes, that was, indeed,
woman! She, too, was like all the others! Why not? She, too, was false,
changeable, and weak, like all of them. She had attracted him, seduced
him with girlish ruses, trying to overcome him without intending to
give him anything in return, enticing him only to refuse him, employing
toward him all the tricks of cowardly coquettes who seem always on the
point of yielding so long as the man who cringes like a dog before them
dares not carry out his desire.

But the situation was the worse for her, after all; he had taken her,
he had overcome her. She might try to wash away that fact and answer
him insolently; she could efface nothing, and he--he would forget it!
Indeed, it would have been a fine bit of folly to embarrass himself
with this sort of mistress, who would eat into his artist life with the
capricious teeth of a pretty woman.

He felt a desire to whistle, as he did in the presence of his models,
but realized that his nerve was giving way and feared to commit
some stupidity. He cut short the sitting under pretense of having an
appointment. When they bowed at parting they felt themselves farther
apart than the day they first met at the Duchesse de Mortemain's.

As soon as she had gone, he took his hat and topcoat and went out. A
cold sun, in a misty blue sky, threw over the city a pale, depressing,
unreal light.

After he had walked a long time, with rapid and irritated step, elbowing
the passers-by that he need not deviate from a straight line, his great
fury against her began to change into sadness and regret. After he
had repeated to himself all the reproaches he had poured upon her, he
remembered, as he looked at the women that passed him, how pretty and
charming she was. Like many others who do not adm