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'Please, Monsieur David. We were good friends this morning. Be now and always my good friend! He shook his head again, but he let himself be led by her. Still holding him torn between her quick remorse and her eagerness for Taranne's letter, she unlocked her door. One dart for the table. Yes! there it lay.
How can a girl helpless without friends make her way by herself? Some one must hold out a hand, and for me it seems there is no one no one! The outburst seemed to his common sense to imply the most grotesque oblivion of her success in the Salon, of Taranne's kindness the most grotesque sensitiveness to a few casual lines of print.
She in her corner tried to be angry, to harden her heart, to possess herself only with the thought of Taranne's letter. But the evening was not as the morning. That dark teasing figure at the other end, outlined against the light of the window, intruded, took up a share in her reverie she resented but could not prevent nay, presently absorbed it altogether.
What did she say to a garret and a studio somewhere near the Quai St.-Michel, in the Quartier Latin, rooms whence they might catch a glimpse of the Seine and Notre-Dame, where she would be within easy reach of Taranne's studio, and the Luxembourg, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and the Louvre rooms where after their day's work they might meet, shut out the world and let in heaven a home consecrate at once to art and love?
The tall black-bearded Lenain was older, had been for years in Taranne's atelier, was an excellent draughtsman, and was now just beginning seriously upon the painting of large pictures for exhibition. In his thin long face there was a pinched and anxious look, as though in the artist's inmost mind there lay hidden the presentiment of failure.
Her mind was full of a hundred miseres d'atelier, of imaginary enemies and intrigues; one minute she was all hope, the next all fear; and she turned sick when she thought of Taranne's letter. What had she been entangling herself for? she whose whole life and soul belonged to art and ambition! This comradeship, begun as a caprice, an adventure, was becoming too serious.
Was it the daily commerce with new forms of art and intelligence which Paris and her companionship had brought him? or simply the added care which a man in love instinctively takes of the little details of his dress and social conduct? which had given him this look of greater maturity, greater distinction? Her heart fluttered a little then she fell back on the thought of Taranne's letter.
He recollected patrols up and down the Rue Chantal; talks with Madame Merichat; the gleam in her eyes as he slipped his profitless bribes into her hand; visits to Taranne's atelier, where the concierge at last grew suspicious and reported the matter within; and finally an interview with the artist himself, from which the English youth emerged no nearer to his end than before, and crushed under the humiliation of the great man's advice.
It is just like him to play a practical joke on strangers. No doubt you have paid him already n'est-ce pas? I thought as much. Well, never mind! My rooms are next door. I am Elise Delaunay. I work in Taranne's atelier. I am an artist, pure and simple, and I live to please myself and nobody else. But I have a chair or two, and the woman downstairs looks after me because I make it worth her while.
And putting his arm through Ancrum's, he swept him away, repeating, as they walked, the substance of a letter from his precious nephew, in which the Barbizon episode as it appeared to the inhabitants of No. 7 Rue Chantal and to the students of Taranne's atelier de femmes was related, with every embellishment of witticism and blague that the imagination of a French rapin could suggest.
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