at stake. Sometimes
she wanted him to paint some little thing on the fan of a foreign lady
who was eager to take away from Spain some souvenir of the great master.
The person in question had asked her at a diplomatic soiree the night
before, knowing her friendship with Renovales. Or she had sent for him
to ask him for some little sketch, a daub, any one of the little things
that lay in the corner of his studio for a bazaar of the Association for
the Benefit of Fallen Women, whom the countess and her friends were very
eager to rescue.

"Don't put on such a wry face, master, don't be stingy. You must expect
to sacrifice something for friendship. Everybody thinks that I have
great power over the famous artist, and they ask me favors and are
constantly getting me into difficulty. They don't know you, they don't
realize how perverse, how rebellious you are, you horrid man!"

And she let him kiss her hand, smiling condescendingly. But as she felt
the touch of his lips and his beard on her arm she struggled to free
herself, half-laughing, half-trembling.

"Let me go, Mariano! I'll scream! I'll call Marie! I won't receive you
again in my bedroom. You aren't worthy of being trusted. Quiet, master,
or I'll tell Josephina everything."

Sometimes when Renovales came, full of alarm at her summons, he found
her pale, with dark circles under her eyes, as if she had spent the
night weeping. When she saw the master her tears began to flow again. It
was pique, deep pain at Monteverde's coldness. He passed whole days
without seeing her; he even went so far as to say that women are a
hindrance to serious study. Oh, these scholars! And she, madly devoted
to him, submissive as a slave, putting up with his whimsical moods,
worshiping him with that ardent passion of a woman who is older than her
lover and appreciates her own inferiority!

"Oh, Renovales. Never fall in love. It is hell. You do not know the
happiness you enjoy in not understanding these things."

But the master, indifferent to her tears, enraged by her confidences,
walked up and down gesticulating, just as if he were in his studio, and
he spoke to the countess with brutal frankness, as he would to a woman
who had revealed all her secrets and weaknesses. What difference did all
that make to him? Had she sent for him to tell him such stuff? She
grieved with childish sighs from the bed. She was alone in the world,
she was very unhappy. The master was her only friend; he was h