That morning! It brought a quick twinge of pain to Marie-Louise's heart. The salon had been--had been--oh, she did not know how to describe it--only Madame Mi-mi had said it was often like that, that Jean led the gay life, and why not, since he had the _sous_ to pay and was rich? There had been broken glasses, and confusion, and callous ruin of things that were priceless, and cards strewn over the floor--and--and somehow she had not been able to keep her eyes from being wet all the time she had been cleaning up the room. It--it made her heart very heavy, and very sorrowful. And yet, too, in a way, she could understand--because she understood Jean. Long, long ago she had been afraid--afraid of his success for him, even while she had prayed for it. If Jean had only a mother, only some one whose love would hold him back. If he were married--if he had a wife--it would change all this sort of life that he led now. Yes; if he were married! She could think of that quite calmly, in a perfectly impersonal way. Why should she not? Some day Jean would marry--marry some one out of this new world in which she had no part, which to her was so very strange and foreign and hard to understand; but which to Jean was so natural, and which, henceforth, could be the only life he would know. Yes; she could think of his marrying quite calmly. And why not? She had no longer part in that--she had passed out of Jean's life long ago, that day in Bernay-sur-Mer. Perhaps it would be Mademoiselle Bliss--Hector had hinted at it and winked prodigiously. She found her hand clenching very hard at her side. It seemed very, very strange, and it was very, very curious that, while she could think quite calmly of Jean marrying some one because it would be very good for Jean to marry, a pang came and her heart rebelled when the "some one," instead of being vague and general and indefinite, became a particular "some one" that was very definite and was not vague at all!
Marie-Louise sighed a little. She did not understand. Everything was so hard to understand. She sighed again--and then, walking slowly across the room, she parted the portières and stepped into the _atelier_.
Here, for an instant, she stood hesitant, just inside the archway, looking about her. How bright the moonlight was, and how it poured in and bathed everything in its soft luminous glow, except that, strangely, there seemed to be a shadow on the white-wrapt statue of the girl that puzzled her for a moment--ah, yes, it was the door of the dressing-room, the room where Hector said the models prepared for their poses, that was wide open and kept the moonlight from the statue. She moved forward, closed the door quietly, and went then and uncovered the clay figure and stood before it. She could look her fill now--yet it seemed that she could never do that, for her craving and her longing were insatiable. All other things in this life of Jean's, in this life of hers that she was living for a little while, filled her with dismay and confusion; but this, this work of Jean's, this figure before her was real, it seemed somehow to bring her closer to her own world, to those things she could understand. She did not know why--only that it was so, and that it was perhaps because of that the girl with the drum had been haunting her so constantly.