and on which a
virgin smile was flickering. The studio then resembled not a studio, but
a group of angels seated on a cloud in ether.

By mid-day, on this occasion, Servin had not appeared. For some days
past he had spent most of his time in a studio which he kept elsewhere,
where he was giving the last touches to a picture for the Exposition.
All of a sudden Mademoiselle Amelie Thirion, the leader of the
aristocrats, began to speak in a low voice, and very earnestly, to
her neighbor. A great silence fell on the group of patricians, and the
commercial party, surprised, were equally silent, trying to discover the
subject of this earnest conference. The secret of the young _ultras_ was
soon revealed.

Amelie rose, took an easel which stood near hers, carried it to a
distance from the noble group, and placed it close to a board partition
which separated the studio from the extreme end of the attic, where all
broken casts, defaced canvases and the winter supply of wood were kept.
Amelie's action caused a murmur of surprise, which did not prevent her
from accomplishing the change by rolling hastily to the side of the
easel the stool, the box of colors, and even the picture by Prudhon,
which the absent pupil was copying. After this coup d'etat the Right
began to work in silence, but the Left discoursed at length.

"What will Mademoiselle Piombo say to that?" asked a young girl of
Mademoiselle Matilde Roguin, the lively oracle of the banking group.

"She's not a girl to say anything," was the reply; "but fifty years
hence she'll remember the insult as if it were done to her the night
before, and revenge it cruelly. She is a person that I, for one, don't
want to be at war with."

"The slight these young ladies mean to put upon her is all the more
unkind," said another young girl, "because yesterday, Mademoiselle
Ginevra was very sad. Her father, they say, has just resigned. They
ought not to add to her trouble, for she was very considerate of them
during the Hundred Days. Never did she say a word to wound them. On the
contrary, she avoided politics. But I think our _ultras_ are acting more
from jealousy than from party spite."

"I have a great mind to go and get Mademoiselle Piombo's easel and place
it next to mine," said Matilde Roguin. She rose, but second thoughts
made her sit down again.

"With a character like hers," she said, "one can't tell how she would
take a civility; better wait events."

"Ecco la," said t