ons in painting whenever
he should have time.

Besides, she thought his more recent pictures very pretty. After that
year of rest in the open country, in the full sunlight, he painted
with fresh and clearer vision, as it were, with a more harmonious and
brighter colouring. He had never before been able to treat reflections
so skilfully, or possessed a more correct perception of men and things
steeped in diffuse light. And henceforth, won over by that feast of
colours, she would have declared it all capital if he would only have
condescended to finish his work a little more, and if she had not
remained nonplussed now and then before a mauve ground or a blue tree,
which upset all her preconceived notions of colour. One day when she
ventured upon a bit of criticism, precisely about an azure-tinted
poplar, he made her go to nature and note for herself the delicate
bluishness of the foliage. It was true enough, the tree was blue; but
in her inmost heart she did not surrender, and condemned reality; there
ought not to be any blue trees in nature.

She no longer spoke but gravely of the studies hanging in the
dining-room. Art was returning into their lives, and it made her muse.
When she saw him go off with his bag, his portable easel, and his
sunshade, it often happened that she flung herself upon his neck,
asking:

'You love me, say?'

'How silly you are! Why shouldn't I love you?'

'Then kiss me, since you love me, kiss me a great deal, a great deal.'

Then accompanying him as far as the road, she added:

'And mind you work; you know that I have never prevented you from
working. Go, go; I am very pleased when you work.'

Anxiety seemed to seize hold of Claude, when the autumn of the second
year tinged the leaves yellow, and ushered in the cold weather. The
season happened to be abominable; a fortnight of pouring rain kept him
idle at home; and then fog came at every moment, hindering his work. He
sat in front of the fire, out of sorts; he never spoke of Paris, but
the city rose up over yonder, on the horizon, the winter city, with its
gaslamps flaring already at five o'clock, its gatherings of friends,
spurring each other on to emulation, and its life of ardent production,
which even the frosts of December could not slacken. He went there
thrice in one month, on the pretext of seeing Malgras, to whom he had,
again, sold a few small pictures. He no longer avoided passing in front
of Faucheur's inn; he even allowed