disgusted with
it! It's hard. I am reduced to the point of envying my poor Constance,
who passes her days in her chair, never opening her mouth, but smiling
all by herself at her memories of the past. I have not even that, not
even any pleasant memories to recall. I have nothing but work--work!"

[Illustration: _In Felicia's Studio_]

As she spoke, she worked fiercely, sometimes with the tool, sometimes
with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time on a little sponge
kept on the wooden frame on which the group stood; so that her
complaints, her lamentations, inexplicable in a mouth of twenty years
which had in repose the purity of a Grecian smile, seemed to be uttered
at random, and addressed to no one in particular. And yet Jenkins
seemed anxious and disturbed, notwithstanding the apparent interest he
displayed in the artist's work, or rather in the artist herself, in the
queenly grace of that mere girl, whose style of beauty seemed to have
predestined her to the study of the plastic arts.

Annoyed by that admiring glance, which she felt like a weight, Felicia
resumed:

"By the way, do you know that I saw your Nabob? He was pointed out to
me at the Opera, Friday."

"Were you at the Opera, Friday?"

"Yes. The duke sent me his box."

Jenkins changed color.

"I persuaded Constance to go with me. It was the first time in twenty
years, since her farewell performance, that she had entered the Opera.
It made a great impression on her. During the ballet especially, she
trembled, she beamed, all her former triumphs sparkled in her eyes. How
fortunate one is to have such emotions. A perfect type of his class,
that Nabob. You must bring him to see me. It would amuse me to do his
head."

"What! why he is frightful! You can't have had a good look at him."

"Indeed I did, on the contrary. He was opposite us. That white
Ethiopian visage would be superb in marble. And not commonplace, at all
events. Moreover, if he's so ugly as all that, you won't be so unhappy
as you were last year when I was doing Mora's bust. What a wicked face
you had at that time, Jenkins!"

"Not for ten years of life," muttered Jenkins in a threatening voice,
"would I go through those hours again. But it amuses you to see people
suffer."

"You know very well that nothing amuses me," she said, shrugging her
shoulders with supreme impertinence.

Then, without looking at him, without another word, she plunged into
one of those periods of in