But I am not so destitute of talent as to
care about politics."

He looked around the room, and at the furniture with familiar tenderness.
He opened a drawer:

"Here are mamma's eye-glasses. How she searched for these eye-glasses!
Now I will show you my room. If it is not in order you must excuse Madame
Fusellier, who is trained to respect my disorder."

The curtains at the windows were down. He did not lift them. After an
hour she drew back the red satin draperies; rays of light dazzled her
eyes and fell on her floating hair. She looked for a mirror and found
only a looking-glass of Venice, dull in its wide ebony border. Rising on
the tips of her toes to see herself in it, she said:

"Is that sombre and far-away spectre I? The women who have looked at
themselves in this glass can not have complimented you on it."

As she was taking pins from the table she noticed a little bronze figure
which she had not yet seen. It was an old Italian work of Flemish taste:
a nude woman, with short legs and heavy stomach, who apparently ran with
an arm extended. She thought the figure had a droll air. She asked what
she was doing.

"She is doing what Madame Mundanity does on the portal of the cathedral
at Basle."

But Therese, who had been at Basle, did not know Madame Mundanity. She
looked at the figure again, did not understand, and asked:

"Is it something very bad? How can a thing shown on the portal of a
church be so difficult to tell here?"

Suddenly an anxiety came to her:

"What will Monsieur and Madame Fusellier think of me?"

Then, discovering on the wall a medallion wherein Dechartre had modelled
the profile of a girl, amusing and vicious:

"What is that?"

"That is Clara, a newspaper girl. She brought the Figaro to me every
morning. She had dimples in her cheeks, nests for kisses. One day I said
to her: 'I will make your portrait.' She came, one summer morning, with
earrings and rings which she had bought at the Neuilly fair. I never saw
her again. I do not know what has become of her. She was too instinctive
to become a fashionable demi-mondaine. Shall I take it out?"

"No; it looks very well in that corner. I am not jealous of Clara."

It was time to return home, and she could not decide to go. She put her
arms around her lover's neck.

"Oh, I love you! And then, you have been to-day good-natured and gay.
Gayety becomes you so well. I should like to make you gay always. I need
joy almost as much as lo