“In no way,” replied the minister sharply, speaking with truth.

Public affairs, in fact, absorbed him, and he found it necessary to steal the precious time to make a hasty trip to Rue Prony.  A vacation, it is true, was near.  In less than a month, Vaudrey would have more time at his disposal.  But for more than three weeks yet, the minister would have everything to modify and change,—­everything to put into a healthy shape, as Warcolier said—­in the Hotel Beauvau.

What matter!  He found the time to fly incognito to the Maison de Vanda, leaving his coupe at the ministry.  Marianne was always there for him when he arrived.  The male domestic or the femme de chambre received him with all the deference that “domestics” show when they suspect that the visitor brings any kind of subsidy to the house.  To Vaudrey, there was a sort of mystery in Mademoiselle Kayser’s life.  Ramel, who knew her uncle Kayser, had told him of the poverty of the painter.  How then, seeing that her uncle was so shabby, could the niece be so sumptuously established?

Kayser, whom he had once met at Marianne’s, had answered such a question by remarking that his niece was a sly puss who understood life thoroughly and would be sure to make headway.  But that was all.

“I have suspected for a long time that that little head was not capable of much,” the painter had added.  “I considered her a light-headed creature, nothing more.  Fool that I was! she is a shrewd woman, a clever woman, a true woman.  I only find fault with her for one thing.”

“What?” asked Vaudrey.

“Do you ask what, Monsieur le Ministre?  The style of her establishment.  It is flashy, tawdry, noisy, it is boudoir art.  It lacks seriousness!  It lacks morality!  I would have in it figures that have style, character.  I don’t ask for saintly pictures, but moral allegories, austere art.  I understand only the severe in art.  I am a puritan in the matter of the brush.  For that reason, I shall attain nothing in these days of genre and water-color painting.”

And Kayser went on painting allegories, to digest his dinner, the pate de foie gras washed down with kummel, of which he had just partaken at his niece’s.

Vaudrey himself viewed those Japanese trifles, those screens, those carpets, those pedestals surmounted by terra-cotta figures presenting in their nudity the flesh tints of woman, those clock-cases above the doors, that profusion of knickknacks, of furniture, of ottomans, that soft upholstery that seemed to be made only to excuse a fall—­nay, even urged to sudden temptations, to chance love, to violent caprices; and on leaving the house, where he had spoken to Marianne only in compliments a hundred times repeated, and where she had but re-echoed sarcasms full of tender, double meanings, as a woman who would undoubtedly yield, but would not offer herself, he bore away with him in his nostrils and, as it were, in his clothes, a permeating, feminine odor, which would now follow him everywhere, and everywhere float about him in whiffs, urging him to return to that house in which a new world seemed to be opening to him.