ntially open nature, the sentiment
of beauty, of truth, which passed from her thoughtful brain, teeming
with ideas, into her fingers with a little quiver of the nerves, a
longing to see the thing done, the image realized. All day she worked
at her sculpture, gave shape to her reveries, with the happy tact of
instinct-guided youth, which imparts so much charm to first works; that
prevented her from regretting too keenly the austere regime of the
Belin institution, which was as perfect a safeguard and as light as the
veil of a novice who has not taken her vows; and it also shielded her
from perilous conversations to which in her one absorbing preoccupation
she paid no heed.

Ruys was proud of the talent springing up by his side. As he grew
weaker from day to day, having already reached the stage at which the
artist regrets his vanishing powers, he followed Felicia's progress as
a consolation for the close of his own career. The modelling-tool,
which trembled in his hand, was seized at his side with virile firmness
and self-assurance, tempered by all of the innate refinement of her
being that a woman can apply to the realization of her ideal of an art.
A curious sensation is that twofold paternity, that survival of genius,
which abandons the one who is going away to pass into the one who is
coming, like the lovely domestic birds which, on the eve of a death,
desert the threatened roof for a more cheerful dwelling.

In the last days of her father's life, Felicia--a great artist, and
still a child--did half of her father's work for him, and nothing could
be more touching than that collaboration of the father and daughter, in
the same studio, sculptors of the same group. Things did not always run
smoothly. Although she was her father's pupil, Felicia's individuality
was already inclined to rebel against any arbitrary guidance. She had
the audacity of beginners, the presentiment of a great future felt only
by youthful geniuses, and, in opposition to the romantic traditions of
Sebastien Ruys, a tendency toward modern realism, a feeling that she
must plant that glorious old flag upon some new monument.

Then there would be terrible scenes, disputes from which the father
would come forth vanquished, annihilated by his daughter's logic,
amazed at the rapid progress children make on the highroads, while
their elders, who have opened the gates for them, remain stationary at
the point of departure. When she was working for him Feli