r, which growls
beneath the girl's long silences and suddenly bursts out in a bitter
word or in an "Ugh!" of disgust at everything. All the critics are
asses. The public? An immense goitre with three rows of chains. And yet,
the other Sunday, when the Duc de Mora came with the superintendent of
the art section to see her exhibits in the studio, she was so happy, so
proud of the praise they gave her, so fully delighted with her own work,
which she admired from the outside, as though the work of some one else,
now that her tools no longer created between her and her work that bond
which makes impartial judgment so hard for the artist.

But it is like this every year. The studio stripped of her recent work,
her glorious name once again thrown to the unexpected caprice of the
public, Felicia's thoughts, now without a visible object, stray in the
emptiness of her heart and in the hollowness of her life--that of the
woman who leaves the quiet groove--until she be engrossed in some new
work. She shuts herself up and will see no one, as though she mistrusted
herself. Jenkins is the only person who can help her during these
attacks. He seems even to court them, as though he expected something
therefrom. She is not pleasant with him, all the same, goodness knows.
Yesterday, even, he stayed for hours beside this wearied beauty without
her speaking to him once. If that be the welcome she is keeping for the
great personage who is doing them the honour of dining with them--Here
the good Crenmitz, who is quietly turning over all these thoughts as she
gazes at the bows on the pointed toes of her slippers, remembers that
she has promised to make a dish of Viennese cakes for the dinner of the
personage in question, and goes out of the studio, silently, on the tips
of her little feet.

The rain falls, the mud deepens; the beautiful sphinx lies still, her
eyes lost in the dull horizon. What is she thinking of? What does she
see coming there, over those filthy roads, in the falling night, that
her lip should take that curve of disgust and her brow that frown? Is
she waiting for her fate? A sad fate, that sets forth in such weather,
fearless of the darkness and the dirt.

Some one comes into the studio with a heavier tread than the mouse-like
step of Constance--the little servant, doubtless; and, without looking
round, Felicia says roughly, "Go away! I don't want any one in."

"I should have liked to speak to you very much, all the same,"