“You are mistaken, I often think of you.”

She had, with, a sweeping glance around the room, examined the furniture of the apartment, the framed pictures, the designs and the gilding, and, on sitting down near the fire with her little feet crossed, she expressed her opinion: 

“Very stylishly ensconced!  You always had good taste, I know, my dear Guy.”

“I have less now than formerly, my dear Marianne,” he said, giving to this airy remark the turn of a compliment.

Marianne shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

“Do you find me very much altered?” she asked abruptly.

“Yes, rejuvenated.”

“I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Upon my honor.  You look like a communicant.”

“Good heavens! what kind?” said Marianne, laughing in a clear, ringing, but slightly convulsive tone.

He was still looking at her curiously, seated thus near the fireplace.

The bright and sparkling fire cast its reflections on the gold frames in waving and rosy tints that brightened the somewhat pale complexion of this young woman and imparted a warm tone to her small and brilliant gray eyes.  She half turned her fair face toward him, her retrousse nose was tiny, spirituelle and mobile, her large sensuous mouth was provoking and seductive, and suggested by its upturned corners, encouragement or a challenge.

She had allowed her cloak, whose fur trimming was well-worn, to slip from her shoulders, exposing her form to the waist; she trembled slightly in her tight-fitting dress, and golden tints played on her bare neck, which was almost hidden under the waves of her copper-colored hair.

She had just taken off her suede gloves with a jerky movement and was abstractedly twisting them between her fingers.

In spite of the somewhat depressing effect of her worn garments, she displayed a natural elegance, a perfect form and graceful movements, and Guy, accustomed as he was to estimate at a glance the material condition of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment.  She whom he had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now burned out like an exploded rocket.

Marianne Kayser!

Of all the women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, passionate and half-mad.  She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of restraint.  Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too rebellious to accept the humiliations of destiny.

She was an orphan, and had been brought up by her uncle, Simon Kayser, a serious painter, indifferent to all that did not concern his art,—­its morality, its dignity, its superiority—­who had, under cover of his own ignorance, allowed the ardent dreams of his niece and her wayward fits to develop freely like poisonous plants; near this man, in the vicious atmosphere of an old bachelor’s disorderly household, Marianne had lived the bitter life of a young woman out of her element, poor, but with every instinct unswervingly leaning towards the enjoyments of luxury.