At the contact of his hand with her own, Felicia made a movement almost of repulsion.

“No, no, leave me alone.  Your pills can do nothing for me.  When I do not work I am bored.  I am bored to death, to extinction; my thoughts are the colour of that water which flows over yonder, brackish and heavy.  To be commencing life, and to be disgusted with it!  It is hard.  I am reduced to the point of envying my poor Constance, who passes her days in her chair, without opening her mouth, but smiling to herself over her memories of the past.  I have not even that, I, happy remembrances to muse upon.  I have only work—­work!”

As she talked she went on modelling furiously, now with the boasting-tool, now with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time on a little sponge placed on the wooden platform which supported the group; so that her complaints, her melancholies, inexplicable in the mouth of a girl of twenty which, in repose, had the purity of a Greek smile, seemed uttered at random and addressed to no one in particular.

Jenkins, however, appeared disturbed by them, troubled, despite the evident attention which he gave to the work of the artist, or rather to the artist herself, to the triumphant grace of this girl whom her beauty seemed to have predestined to the study of the plastic arts.

Embarrassed by the admiring gaze which she felt fixed upon her, Felicia resumed: 

“Apropos, I have seen him, you know, your Nabob.  Some one pointed him out to me last Friday at the opera.”

“You were at the opera on Friday?”

“Yes.  The duke had sent me his box.”

Jenkins changed colour.

“I persuaded Constance to go with me.  It was the first time for twenty-five years since her farewell performance, that she had been inside the Opera-House.  It made a great impression on her.  During the ballet, especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her old triumphs sparkled in her eyes.  Happy who has emotions like that.  A real type, that Nabob.  You will have to bring him to see me.  He has a head that it would amuse me to do.”

“He!  Why, he is hideous!  You cannot have looked at him carefully.”

“On the contrary, I had a perfect view.  He was opposite us.  That mask, as of a white Ethiopian, would be superb in marble.  And not vulgar, in any case.  Besides, since he is so ugly as that, you will not be so unhappy as you were last year when I was doing Mora’s bust.  What a disagreeable face you had, Jenkins, in those days!”

“For ten years of life,” muttered Jenkins in a gloomy voice, “I would not have that time over again.  But you it amuses to behold suffering.”

“You know quite well that nothing amuses me,” said she, shrugging her shoulders with a supreme impertinence.

Then, without looking at him, without adding another word, she plunged into one of those dumb activities by which true artists escape from themselves and from everything that surrounds them.