ue woman. I only find fault with her for one thing."

"What?" asked Vaudrey.

"Do you ask what, Monsieur le Ministre? The style of her establishment.
It is flashy, tawdry, noisy, it is boudoir art. It lacks seriousness! It
lacks morality! I would have in it figures that have style, character. I
don't ask for saintly pictures, but moral allegories, austere art. I
understand only the severe in art. I am a puritan in the matter of the
brush. For that reason, I shall attain nothing in these days of _genre_
and water-color painting."

And Kayser went on painting allegories, to digest his dinner, the pate
de foie gras washed down with kummel, of which he had just partaken at
his niece's.

Vaudrey himself viewed those Japanese trifles, those screens, those
carpets, those pedestals surmounted by terra-cotta figures presenting in
their nudity the flesh tints of woman, those clock-cases above the
doors, that profusion of knickknacks, of furniture, of ottomans, that
soft upholstery that seemed to be made only to excuse a fall--nay, even
urged to sudden temptations, to chance love, to violent caprices; and on
leaving the house, where he had spoken to Marianne only in compliments a
hundred times repeated, and where she had but re-echoed sarcasms full of
tender, double meanings, as a woman who would undoubtedly yield, but
would not offer herself, he bore away with him in his nostrils and, as
it were, in his clothes, a permeating, feminine odor, which would now
follow him everywhere, and everywhere float about him in whiffs, urging
him to return to that house in which a new world seemed to be opening to
him.

He would not long persist in enquiring how Marianne Kayser had procured
all those baubles that so highly incensed the puritan instincts of her
honest uncle. He found himself urged forward with profound delight in
this adventure whose mysterious features pleased him. Bah! the very fact
that he found so much inexplicable in the life of this woman enticed him
all the more. It seemed to him that not only had he entered upon a
romantic course, but that he was himself the hero of the romance. Never,
in the days when he rolled about, an unknown student, on the Parisian
wave, and had lifted his thoughts toward some pale patrician girl,
toward some pretty creature he had caught a glimpse of, leaning back in
a dark-blue coupe, or framed in by the red velvet hangings of a
proscenium box, had he more perfectly incarnated the ideal of hi