r of at once
inviting Vaudrey to call on her. But surrounded by the vulgar
appointments of that poor, almost bare, studio, concealing her poverty
under worn-out hangings, indifferent studies, old, yellowed casts
covered with dust--to receive Vaudrey there would be to confess her
terribly straitened condition, her necessities, her eagerness, all that
repels and freezes love. In glancing around her uncle's studio, she
scrutinized everything with an expression of hatred.

It smacked of dirty poverty, bourgeois ugliness. She would never dare to
ask Vaudrey to sit upon that divan, which was littered with old, torn
books and tobacco grains, and which, when one sat upon it, discharged a
cloud of dust whose atoms danced in the sunlight.

"What are you looking at?" asked Kayser, as he followed his niece's
glances about the room. "You seem to be making an inspection."

"Precisely. And I am thinking that your studio would not fetch a very
high figure at Drouot's auction mart."

"Lofty and moral creations don't sell in times like these," gravely
replied the old dauber. "For myself, I am not a painter of obscene
subjects and lewd photography."

Marianne shrugged her shoulders and went out, coughing involuntarily.
Old Kayser passed his time steeped in the odors of nicotine.

"I am lost, if Vaudrey comes here," she said to herself.

She knew well enough that caprice, the love of those who do not love,
lives on luxury, intoxicating perfumes, shimmering silk, and all the
mysterious surroundings of draperies which are the accompaniment of the
adventure. Vaudrey would recoil before this Bohemian studio. The famous
"nimbus," of which Kayser spoke, was the creature of his tobacco smoke.
What was to be done, then? Receive the minister yonder in that remote
apartment where, all alone,--it was true--she went to dream, dream with
all the strange joys attending isolation? Draw this man to a distant
corner of Paris, in the midst of the ruins of former luxury, as mean as
the wretch's studio?--Eh! that was to acknowledge to Vaudrey that she
was intriguing for a liaison with the single object of quitting the
prison-walls of want. She realized that this man, full of illusions,
believing that he had to do with perhaps a virtuous girl, or, at least,
one who was not moving in her own circle, who was giving herself, but
not selling herself, would shrink at the reality on finding himself face
to face with an adventuress.

"Illusion is everything!