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own life were wrapped up In them, given in exchange for them, as though indeed she were a very part of them, and they were of her blood and flesh. She pressed her hands very tightly together over the key, and then opened them and let the key lay in her palm to look at it in the moonlight. She had seen so little in the studio, so very little! In the three mornings she had been there, there had always been Madame Mi-mi to fuss around her, to instruct her in her work, or, failing that as an excuse--to gossip. And if it were not madame, then it was Hector--and often it was both. And she had so wanted to be alone there--it was not very much to ask, that--just to be alone there for a little time with Jean's things around her, to be very quiet, to be alone. Why should she not go now? It was not a sin that she would commit. It was only that if Father Anton knew, or Madame Garneau knew they would not understand--but they would never know. No one would ever know. Jean would be upstairs asleep; and Hector and his wife would be downstairs in bed. That statue, that wonderful statue of the girl with the drum, would be more wonderful than ever with the bright moonlight pouring in upon it through that great glass roof of the _atelier_. She had seen so little of it, because when she was there it was always wrapped up in damp cloths; she had seen it only when that absurd Hector had exhibited it to her with a patronising air as though he had modelled it himself, making use of a flood of technical expressions of which she did not understand a word, and of whose meaning she was quite sure he was equally ignorant, but having heard the words around the studio repeated them like a parrot. She had seen so little of it, when her soul cried out to see so much. It haunted her, that statue--why, she did not know. It was before her always--in her dreams, which were always dreams of the salon and the _atelier_, the figure with the drum always stood out above everything else, even though everything else, even though the very smallest things and details there were so dear and intimate too. Was it a sin to go and stand and look, when her heart was so full of the longing that it would not be denied? Who was there to say, "you went to Jean's studio at two o'clock in the morning," when, in the quiet and the stillness there, there would be only herself, and that great figure with the drum, and the _bon Dieu_, who made Jean do such wondrou
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