t not be too young. Let her have had
affairs enough to know that ours was only one more and would probably be
as brief as the rest--the briefer the better.

So tamely I pictured my first love. And the gay old city of Paris
smiled, and in that bantering way of hers she brought to me in a cafe
one night a perfect young tigress of a girl, a lithe, dusky beauty with
smouldering eyes, and said:

"Without doubt this one is better for you. Regard what loveliness, what
fire! Oh, my son, why not be brave?"

I was not brave, I barely spoke, and my friend the little Hungarian Jew
who had brought her to my table was forced to do the talking. For she,
too, was silent. But how different was her silence from the quiet I had
pictured. Presently, however, I became a little easier, and by degrees
we began to talk. She told me she was a painter. An Armenian by birth,
she had run away from home at eighteen, and here for two years in
Julien's she had tried to paint till she felt she'd go mad. She talked
in abrupt, eager sentences, breaking off to watch people around us. How
her big eyes fastened upon them. "To watch faces until you are sure--and
then paint! There is nothing else in the world!" she said. And I found
this reassuring.

After that I saw her many nights. And from time to time breaking that
silence of hers, she became so fiercely confiding, not only about her
painting, but about what she called her innermost soul, that soon I
could look my De Maupassant square in the face, man to man, for I was
learning a lot about women. As yet we were friends and nothing more, but
I could feel both of us changing fast. "In a little while," I thought.

But alas. One night she took me up to her room and showed me her
paintings. They were bad. They were fearfully bad, and my face must have
shown the impression they made.

"You consider them frightful!" she exclaimed. I stoutly denied it, but
things only went from bad to worse. Here was that temperament I had
dreaded. Now she was clutching both my arms.

"Mon dieu! Why not say it? Why cannot you say it?"

"No," I replied. "You have done some extremely powerful work!" Anything
to quiet her nerves. "Especially this one--look--over here!" And I
pointed to one of her pictures.

"I will show you how I shall look at it!" she cried in a perfect frenzy
of tears. She snatched up a knife that lay on her table, a very old,
curved, Armenian knife, and went at the painting and slashed it to
shreds, a