“Do not be unhappy, my little Wenceslas,” said Lisbeth with feeling. “My cousin Hortense thought your seal quite pretty, I am sure; and I will manage to sell your bronze group, you will see; you will have paid me off, you will be able to do as you please, you will soon be free. Come, smile a little!”
“I can never repay you, mademoiselle,” said the exile.
“And why not?” asked the peasant woman, taking the Livonian’s part against herself.
“Because you not only fed me, lodged me, cared for me in my poverty, but you also gave me strength. You have made me what I am; you have often been stern, you have made me very unhappy----”
“I?” said the old maid. “Are you going to pour out all your nonsense once more about poetry and the arts, and to crack your fingers and stretch your arms while you spout about the ideal, and beauty, and all your northern madness?--Beauty is not to compare with solid pudding--and what am I!--You have ideas in your brain? What is the use of them? I too have ideas. What is the good of all the fine things you may have in your soul if you can make no use of them? Those who have ideas do not get so far as those who have none, if they don’t know which way to go.
“Instead of thinking over your ideas you must work.--Now, what have you done while I was out?”
“Who told you she was pretty?” asked Lisbeth sharply, in a tone hollow with tiger-like jealousy.
“That was only to see your face. Do you want to go trotting after petticoats? You who are so fond of women, well, make them in bronze. Let us see a cast of your desires, for you will have to do without the ladies for some little time yet, and certainly without my cousin, my good fellow. She is not game for your bag; that young lady wants a man with sixty thousand francs a year--and has found him!
“Why, your bed is not made!” she exclaimed, looking into the adjoining room. “Poor dear boy, I quite forgot you!”
The sturdy woman pulled off her gloves, her cape and bonnet, and remade the artist’s little camp bed as briskly as any housemaid. This mixture of abruptness, of roughness even, with real kindness, perhaps accounts for the ascendency Lisbeth had acquired over the man whom she regarded as her personal property. Is not our attachment to life based on its alternations of good and evil?