g to these words, in which a very insolent idea was
contained, she laughed and turned her eyes away. But bending
toward her with a smile which might remind one of a satyr, and
with a request in his voice, he asked:

"Is this nature? is it art?"

With a sudden resolve she answered:

"It is nature!"

And she wished to equal the boldness of her answer with the
boldness of her look, but a flaming blush shot over her face, and
the lids covered her eyes, into which shame had gushed forth.
Though maiden modesty was a painted pot, this new change, to
which Irene had yielded, exercised on the baron a new irritating
influence. In the midst of the rustling materials he seized both
her hands, his eyes flashed magnetic rays into her flushed face;
he drew her delicate form toward him. She tried to twist her
hands away, and with a violent effort strove to throw her bust
backward, but the fragile baron was very strong at that instant;
he pressed her hands in his as in a vice, and whispered into her
very face:

"Do not fight against that cry of life which is heard within
you--I am a despot--I know how to will--"

With the last word he pressed his lips to hers. But that moment
she, too, gained unexpected strength, and in a flash she was some
steps away from him, very pale now and trembling throughout her
whole body.

"This is too much of nature!" cried she.

Her head was erect, and from her eyes came flashing sparks, which
soon melted, however, into cold irony. Shrugging her shoulders,
with a smile she exclaimed:

"Dieu! que c'etait vulgaire!"

Then holding her skirt with both hands, as if she wished not to
take one atom of dust from that room with her, she went out into
the shop; the baron saw her talk to the tailor for a moment with
her usual coolness, and then turn to go with the ordinary words
of brief leave-taking.

But now Irene sitting there on that tall stool at the window,
surrounded by the fading gleam of the blue watered-silk, and
against the background of the pane which was covered with a
whitish gloom, seemed a statue with a delicate bust, and a
somewhat prolonged profile settled in stony fixedness. The "cry
of life" possessed as words the charm of novelty and daring, but
when changed into an act it roused in her every feeling of
offence and maiden modesty. The shaggy beast had ventured out too
far from behind the heliotropes, and had given forth too rank a
smell of the den and the troglodytes. "It is vulga