She felt like choking with rage. “Oh! is
it right,” she thought, “for parents to
persist in keeping a young girl forever in her cradle,
so to speak?”
A DANGEROUS MODEL
Time passed too quickly to please Jacqueline.
Her portrait was finished at last, notwithstanding
the willingness Marien had shown—or so it
seemed to her—to retouch it unnecessarily
that she might again and again come back to his atelier.
But it was done at last. She glided into that
dear atelier for the last time, her heart big with
regret, with no hope that she would ever again put
on the fairy robe which had, she thought, transfigured
her till she was no longer little Jacqueline.
“I want you only for one moment, and I need
only your face,” said Marien. “I
want to change—a line—I hardly
know what to call it, at the corner of your mouth.
Your father is right; your mouth is too grave.
Think of something amusing—of the Bal Blanc
at Madame d’Etaples, or merely, if you like,
of the satisfaction it will give you to be done with
these everlasting sittings—to be no longer
obliged to bear the burden of a secret, in short to
get rid of your portrait-painter.”
She made him no answer, not daring to trust her voice.
“Come! now, on the contrary you are tightening
your lips,” said Marien, continuing to play
with her as a cat plays with a mouse—provided
there ever was a cat who, while playing with its mouse,
had no intention of crunching it. “You
are not merry, you are sad. That is not at all
becoming to you.”
“Why do you attribute to me your own thoughts?
It is you who will be glad to get rid of all this
trouble.”
Fraulein Schult, who, while patiently adding stitch
after stitch to the long strip of her crochet-work,
was often much amused by the dialogues between sitter
and painter, pricked up her ears to hear what a Frenchman
would say to what was evidently intended to provoke
a compliment.
“On the contrary, I shall miss you very much,”
said Marien, quite simply; “I have grown accustomed
to see you here. You have become one of the familiar
objects of my studio. Your absence will create
a void.”
“About as much as if this or that were gone,”
said Jacqueline, in a hurt tone, pointing first to
a Japanese bronze and then to an Etruscan vase; “with
only this difference, that you care least for the living
object.”
“You are bitter, Mademoiselle.”
“Because you make me such provoking answers,
Monsieur. My feeling is different,” she
went on impetuously, “I could pass my whole life
watching you paint.”
“You would get tired of it probably in the long
run.”
“Never!” she cried, blushing a deep red.
“And you would have to put up with my pipe—that
big pipe yonder—a horror.”
“I should like it,” she cried, with conviction.
“But you would not like my bad temper.
If you knew how ill I can behave sometimes! I
can scold, I can become unbearable, when this, for
example,” here he pointed with his mahlstick
to the Savonarola, “does not please me.”
