"How I am to earn enough _sous_ for my dinner to-morrow--or failing that, what I can sell."
"And yet," he said, "you bid me talk cheerfully, or not at all."
"Why not? Your spirits at least should be good. It is not you who runs the risk of going dinnerless to-morrow."
"You know," he muttered, "you know quite well that your troubles are far more likely to weigh upon me than my own. Do you think that I am utterly selfish?"
"Troubles, my friend," she exclaimed lightly. "But I have no troubles."
He stared at her incredulously, and she laughed very softly.
"What a gloomy person you are!" she murmured. "You call yourself an artist--but you have no temperament. The material cares of life hang about your neck like a millstone. A doubt as to your dinner to-morrow would make you miserable to-night. You know I call that positively wicked. It is not at all what I expected either. On the whole, I think that I have been disappointed with the life here. There is so little _abandon_, so little real joyousness."
"And yet," he murmured, "one of the greatest of our writers has declared that the true spirit of Bohemianism is denied to your sex."
"He was probably right," she declared. "Bohemianism is the least understood word ever coined. I do not think that I have the Bohemian spirit at all."
He looked at her thoughtfully. She wore a plain black dress, reaching almost to her throat--her small oval face, with the large brown eyes, was colourless, delicately expressive, yet with something mysterious in its Sphinx-like immobility. A woman hard to read, who seemed to delight in keeping locked up behind that fascinating rigidity of feature the intense sensibility which had been revealed to him, her master, only in occasional and rare moments of enthusiasm. She reminded him sometimes of the one holy and ineffable Madonna, at others of Berode, the great courtezan of her day, who had sent kings away from her doors, and had just announced her intention of ending her life in a convent.
"I believe that you are right," he said softly. "It is the worst of including in our vocabulary words which have no definite meaning, perhaps I should say of which the meaning varies according to one's personal point of view. You, for instance, you live, you are not afraid to live. Yet you make our Bohemianism seem like a vulgar thing."