ty. Dazzled by the beauty of her body she did not notice
the face, that seemed unimportant, lost in soft veils. When her eyes
fell on it she showed a sort of disappointment.

"It doesn't look much like me! It isn't my face!"

The artist smiled. It was not she; he had tried to disguise her face,
nothing but her face. It was a mask, a concession to social conventions.
As it was, no one would recognize her and his work, his great work,
might appear and receive the admiration of the world.

"Because, we aren't going to destroy it," Renovales continued with a
tremble in his voice, "that would be a crime. Never in my life will I be
able to do anything like it again. We won't destroy it, will we, little
girl?"

The little girl remained silent for a good while with her gaze fixed on
the picture. Renovales' eager eyes saw a cloud slowly rise over her
face, like a shadow on a white wall. The painter felt as though the
floor were sinking under his feet; the storm was coming. Josephina
turned pale, two tears slipped slowly down her cheeks, two others took
their places to fall with them and then more and more.

"I won't! I won't!"

It was the same hoarse, nervous, despotic cry that had set his hair on
end with anxiety and fear that night in Rome. The little woman looked
with hatred at the naked body that radiated its pearly light from the
depths of the canvas. She seemed to feel the terror of a sleep-walker
who suddenly awakens in the midst of a square surrounded by a thousand
curious, eager eyes and in her fright does not know what to do nor where
to flee. How could she have assented to such a disgraceful thing?

"I won't have it!" she cried angrily. "Destroy it, Mariano, destroy it."

But Mariano seemed on the point of weeping too. Destroy it! Who could
demand such a foolish thing? That figure was not she; no one would
recognize her. What was the use of depriving him of a signal triumph?
But his wife did not listen to him. She was rolling on the floor with
the same convulsions and moans as on the night of the stormy scene, her
hands were clenched like a crook, her feet kicked like a dying lamb's
and her mouth, painfully distorted, kept crying hoarsely:

"I won't have it! I won't have it! Destroy it!"

She complained of her lot with a violence that wounded Renovales. She, a
respectable woman, submitted to that degradation as if she were a street
walker. If she had only known! How was she going to imagine that her
husband