ng
for a French girl thus to talk to a young man, but I suppose it is
different with them. Who can understand these strange islanders? Why, if
Lucien were going out to fight I should dissolve in tears, I should
embrace him and hang on his neck; I might even have hysterics, though I
have never had them in my life. She is a good girl, too, though she has
such strange ideas about women. What can she want for them? I manage the
house and Lucien goes to his office. If I say a thing is to be done in
the house it is done. I call that equality. I cannot tell what she is
aiming at. At times it seems to me that she is even more mad than her
compatriots, and yet on other subjects she talks with good sense. What
her father and mother can be about to let her be living abroad by
herself is more than I can think. They must be even more mad than she
is."

Work at M. Goude's school went on steadily during the intervals between
the turns of the Franc-tireurs des Ecoles going out beyond the walls.
Indeed M. Goude acknowledged that the work was better than usual.
Certainly the studio was never merrier or more full of life. So far from
the active exercise and the rough work entailed by the constant
vigilance necessary during the long night-watches, diminishing the
interest of the young fellows in their work in the studio, it seemed to
invigorate them, and they painted as if inflamed with the determination
to make up for lost time.

It converted them, in fact, for the time, from a group of careless,
merry young fellows, into men with a sense of responsibility. Their time
when away from the studio had previously been spent in follies and
frivolities. They often drank much more than was good for them, smoked
inordinately, were up half the night, and came in the morning to work
with heavy heads and nerveless hands. Now they were soldiers, men who
matched themselves against the invaders of their country, who risked
their lives in her defence, and they bore themselves more erectly, a
tone of earnestness replaced a languid indifference and a carelessness
as to their work, and in spite of some privations in the way of food
their figures seemed to expand.

The loss of two nights' sleep a week rendered early hours necessary, and
ensured sound sleep during the remaining five. The discipline of the
studio had been relaxed. The master felt that at such a time he could
not expect the same silent concentration on work that it demanded at
other times,