very creditable in it?  Then, on noticing his joy or suffering, according to the success or the failure of the day’s work, she began to associate herself with his efforts.  She felt saddened when she found him sad, she grew cheerful when he received her cheerfully; and from that moment her worry was—­had he done a lot of work? was he satisfied with what he had done since they had last seen each other?  At the end of the second month she had been gained over; she stationed herself before his pictures to judge whether they were progressing or not.  She no longer felt afraid of them.  She still did not approve particularly of that style of painting, but she began to repeat the artistic expressions which she had heard him use; declared this bit to be ‘vigorous in tone,’ ‘well built up,’ or ’just in the light it should be.’  He seemed to her so good-natured, and she was so fond of him, that after finding excuses for him for daubing those horrors, she ended by discovering qualities in them in order that she might like them a little also.

Nevertheless, there was one picture, the large one, the one intended for the Salon, to which for a long while she was quite unable to reconcile herself.  She already looked without dislike at the studies made at the Boutin studio and the sketches of Plassans, but she was still irritated by the sight of the woman lying in the grass.  It was like a personal grudge, the shame of having momentarily thought that she could detect in it a likeness of herself, and silent embarrassment, too, for that big figure continued to wound her feelings, although she now found less and less of a resemblance in it.  At first she had protested by averting her eyes.  Now she remained for several minutes looking at it fixedly, in mute contemplation.  How was it that the likeness to herself had disappeared?  The more vigorously that Claude struggled on, never satisfied, touching up the same bit a hundred times over, the more did that likeness to herself gradually fade away.  And, without being able to account for it, without daring to admit as much to herself, she, whom the painting had so greatly offended when she had first seen it, now felt a growing sorrow at noticing that nothing of herself remained.

Indeed it seemed to her as if their friendship suffered from this obliteration; she felt herself further away from him as trait after trait vanished.  Didn’t he care for her that he thus allowed her to be effaced from his work?  And who was the new woman, whose was the unknown indistinct face that appeared from beneath hers?

Claude, in despair at having spoilt the figure’s head, did not know exactly how to ask her for a few hours’ sitting.  She would merely have had to sit down, and he would only have taken some hints.  But he had previously seen her so pained that he felt afraid of irritating her again.  Moreover, after resolving in his own mind to ask her this favour in a gay, off-hand way, he had been at a loss for words, feeling all at once ashamed at the notion.