They went up the creaking stairway, shaped like a ladder, and in a first-story room a maid servant brought wine and biscuits to them.  On the mantelpiece, at one of the corners of the room, was an oval mirror in a flower-covered frame.  Through the open window one saw the Seine, its green shores, and the hills in the distance bathed with warm air.  The trembling peace of a summer evening filled the sky, the earth, and the water.

Therese looked at the running river.  The boat passed on the water, and when the wake which it left reached the shore it seemed as if the house rocked like a vessel.

“I like the water,” said Therese.  “How happy I am!”

Their lips met.

Lost in the enchanted despair of love, time was not marked for them except by the cool plash of the water, which at intervals broke under the half-open window.  To the caressing praise of her lover she replied: 

“It is true I was made for love.  I love myself because you love me.”

Certainly, he loved her; and it was not possible for him to explain to himself why he loved her with ardent piety, with a sort of sacred fury.  It was not because of her beauty, although it was rare and infinitely precious.  She had exquisite lines, but lines follow movement, and escape incessantly; they are lost and found again; they cause aesthetic joys and despair.  A beautiful line is the lightning which deliciously wounds the eyes.  One admires and one is surprised.  What makes one love is a soft and terrible force, more powerful than beauty.  One finds one woman among a thousand whom one wants always.  Therese was that woman whom one can not leave or betray.

She exclaimed, joyfully: 

“I never shall be forsaken?”

She asked why he did not make her bust, since he thought her beautiful.

“Why?  Because I am an ordinary sculptor, and I know it; which is not the faculty of an ordinary mind.  But if you wish to think that I am a great artist, I will give you other reasons.  To create a figure that will live, one must take the model like common material from which one will extract the beauty, press it, crush it, and obtain its essence.  There is nothing in you that is not precious to me.  If I made your bust I should be servilely attached to these things which are everything to me because they are something of you.  I should stubbornly attach myself to the details, and should not succeed in composing a finished figure.”

She looked at him astonished.

He continued: 

“From memory I might.  I tried a pencil sketch.”  As she wished to see it, he showed it to her.  It was on an album leaf, a very simple sketch.  She did not recognize herself in it, and thought he had represented her with a kind of soul that she did not have.

“Ah, is that the way in which you see me?  Is that the way in which you love me?”

He closed the album.

“No; this is only a note.  But I think the note is just.  It is probable you do not see yourself exactly as I see you.  Every human creature is a different being for every one that looks at it.”