Much work, on the contrary, was done in Mme. Belin’s institution, where the pupils went out only on the principal holidays and had no communication with outside except the visits of relatives on Thursdays, in a little garden planted with flowering shrubs or in the immense parlour with carved and gilded work over its doors.  The first entry of Felicia into this almost monastic house caused indeed a certain sensation; her dresses chosen by the Austrian dancer, her hair curling to her waist, her gait free and easy like a boy’s, aroused some hostility, but she was a Parisian and could adapt herself quickly to every situation and to all surroundings.  A few days later, she looked better than any one in the little black apron, to which the more coquettish were wont to hang their watches, the straight skirt—­a severe and hard prescription at that period when fashion expanded women’s figures with an infinity of flounces—­the regulation coiffure, two plaits tied rather low, at the neck, after the manner of the Roman peasants.

Strange to say, the regularity of the classes, their calm exactitude, suited Felicia’s nature, intelligent and quick, in which the taste for study was relieved by a juvenile expansion at ease in the noisy good-humour of playtime.  She was popular.  Among those daughters of wealthy businessmen, of Parisian lawyers or of gentlemen-farmers, a respectable and rather affectedly serious world, the well-known name of old Ruys, the respect with which at Paris an artist’s reputation is surrounded, created for Felicia a greatly envied position, rendered more brilliant still by her successes in the school-work, a genuine talent for drawing, and her beauty, that superiority which asserts its power even among young girls.  In the wholesale atmosphere of the boarding-school, she was conscious of an extreme pleasure as she grew feminized, in resuming her sex, in learning to know order, regularity, otherwise than these were taught by that amiable dancer whose kisses seemed always to keep the taste of paint and her embraces somewhat artificial in the curving of her arms.  Ruys, her father, was enraptured each time that he came to see his daughter, to find her more grown, womanly, knowing how to enter, to walk, and to leave a room with that pretty courtesy which caused all Mme. Belin’s pupils to long for the trailing rustle of a long skirt.

At first he came often, then, as he had not time enough for all his commissions, accepted and undertaken, the advances on which went to pay for the scrapes, the pleasures of his existence, he was seen more seldom in the parlour.  Finally, sickness intervened.  Stricken by an incurable anaemia, he would remain for weeks without leaving his house, without doing any work.  Thereupon he wished to have his daughter with him again; and from the boarding-school, sheltered by so healthy a tranquility, Felicia returned once more to her father’s studio, haunted still by the same boon companions, the parasites which swarm around every celebrity, into the midst of which sickness had introduced a new personage, Dr. Jenkins.