‘Why, what an idea!’ muttered Sandoz.  ’What are those women doing there?’

‘Why, they are bathing,’ Claude quietly answered.  ’Don’t you see that they have come out of the swimming-baths?  It supplies me with a motive for the nude; it’s a real find, eh?  Does it shock you?’

His old friend, who knew him well by now, dreaded lest he should give him cause for discouragement.

’I?  Oh, no!  Only I am afraid that the public will again fail to understand.  That nude woman in the very midst of Paris—­it’s improbable.’

Claude looked naively surprised.

’Ah! you think so?  Well, so much the worse.  What’s the odds, as long as the woman is well painted?  Besides, I need something like that to get my courage up.’

On the following occasions, Sandoz gently reverted to the strangeness of the composition, pleading, as was his nature, the cause of outraged logic.  How could a modern painter who prided himself on painting merely what was real—­how could he so bastardise his work as to introduce fanciful things into it?  It would have been so easy to choose another subject, in which the nude would have been necessary.  But Claude became obstinate, and resorted to lame and violent explanations, for he would not avow his real motive:  an idea which had come to him and which he would have been at a loss to express clearly.  It was, however, a longing for some secret symbolism.  A recrudescence of romanticism made him see an incarnation of Paris in that nude figure; he pictured the city bare and impassioned, resplendent with the beauty of woman.

Before the pressing objections of his friend he pretended to be shaken in his resolutions.

’Well, I’ll see; I’ll dress my old woman later on, since she worries you,’ he said.  ’But meanwhile I shall do her like that.  You understand, she amuses me.’

He never reverted to the subject again, remaining silently obstinate, merely shrugging his shoulders and smiling with embarrassment whenever any allusion betrayed the general astonishment which was felt at the sight of that Venus emerging triumphantly from the froth of the Seine amidst all the omnibuses on the quays and the lightermen working at the Port of St. Nicolas.

Spring had come round again, and Claude had once more resolved to work at his large picture, when in a spirit of prudence he and Christine modified their daily life.  She, at times, could not help feeling uneasy at seeing all their money so quickly spent.  Since the supply had seemed inexhaustible, they had ceased counting.  But, at the end of four years, they had woke up one morning quite frightened, when, on asking for accounts, they found that barely three thousand francs were left out of the twenty thousand.  They immediately reverted to severe economy, stinting themselves as to bread, planning the cutting down of the most elementary expenses; and it was thus that, in the first impulse of self-sacrifice, they left