ion, reminded the painter of the faun of
the Borghese, a cast of which he had seen and been struck with
admiration for its freakish charm. A faint down of moustache accentuated
the curve of the full lips. A bosom that seemed big with love was
confined by a crossed kerchief in the fashion of the year. Her supple
waist, her active limbs, her whole vigorous body expressed in every
movement a wild, delicious freedom. Every glance, every breath, every
quiver of the warm flesh called for love and promised passion. There,
behind the tradesman's counter, she seemed rather a dancing nymph, a
bacchante of the opera, stripped of her lynx skin and thyrsus,
imprisoned, and travestied by a magician's spell under the modest
trappings of a housewife by Chardin.

"My father is not at home," she told the painter; "wait a little, he
will not be long."

In the small brown hands the needle travelled swiftly over the fine
lawn.

"Is the pattern to your taste, Monsieur Gamelin?"

It was not in Gamelin's nature to pretend. And love, exaggerating his
confidence, encouraged him to speak quite frankly.

"You embroider cleverly, _citoyenne_; but, if I am to say what I think,
the pattern you have traced is not simple enough or bold enough, and
smacks of the affected taste that in France governed too long the
ornamentation of dress and furniture and woodwork; all those rosettes
and wreaths recall the pretty, finikin style that was in favour under
the tyrant. There is a new birth of taste. Alas! we have much leeway to
make up. In the days of the infamous Louis XV the art of decoration had
something Chinese about it. They made pot-bellied cabinets with drawer
handles grotesque in their contortions, good for nothing but to be
thrown on the fire to warm good patriots. Simplicity alone is beautiful.
We must hark back to the antique. David designs beds and chairs from the
Etruscan vases and the wall-paintings of Herculaneum."

"Yes, I have seen those beds and chairs," said Elodie, "they are lovely.
Soon we shall want no other sort. I am like you, I adore the antique."

"Well, then, _citoyenne_," returned Evariste, "if you had limited your
pattern to a Greek border, with ivy leaves, serpents or crossed arrows,
it would have been worthy of a Spartan maiden ... and of you. But you
can still keep this design by simplifying it, reducing it to the plain
lines of beauty."

She asked her preceptor what should be picked out.

He bent over the work, and