Little by little she was reassured.  He loved her, doubtless; but he was not susceptible, not ingenious, happily, in tormenting himself.  She said to herself: 

“He is hunting and enjoying the sport.  He is with his aunt, whom he admires.”  She calmed her fears and returned to the charming gayety of Florence.  She had seen casually, at the Offices, a picture that Dechartre liked.  It was a decapitated head of the Medusa, a work wherein Leonardo, the sculptor said, had expressed the minute profundity and tragic refinement of his genius.  She wished to see it again, regretting that she had not seen it better at first.  She extinguished her lamp and went to sleep.

She dreamed that she met in a deserted church Robert Le Menil enveloped in furs which she had never seen him wear.  He was waiting for her, but a crowd of priests had separated them.  She did not know what had become of him.  She had not seen his face, and that frightened her.  She awoke and heard at the open window a sad, monotonous cry, and saw a humming-bird darting about in the light of early dawn.  Then, without cause, she began to weep in a passion of self-pity, and with the abandon of a child.

CHAPTER XI

“The dawn of faith and love”

She took pleasure in dressing early, with delicate and subtle taste.  Her dressing-room, an aesthetic fantasy of Vivian Bell, with its coarsely varnished pottery, its tall copper pitchers, and its faience pavement, like a chess-board, resembled a fairy’s kitchen.  It was rustic and marvellous, and the Countess Martin could have in it the agreeable surprise of mistaking herself for a fairy.  While her maid was dressing her hair, she heard Dechartre and Choulette talking under her windows.  She rearranged all the work Pauline had done, and uncovered the line of her nape, which was fine and pure.  She looked at herself in the glass, and went into the garden.

Dechartre was there, reciting verses of Dante, and looking at Florence:  “At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh. . .”

Near him, Choulette, seated on the balustrade of the terrace, his legs hanging, and his nose in his beard, was still at work on the figure of Misery on his stick.

Dechartre resumed the rhymes of the canticle:  “At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of thoughts, is almost divine in its visions, . . . .”

She approached beside the boxwood hedge, holding a parasol and dressed in a straw-colored gown.  The faint sunlight of winter enveloped her in pale gold.

Dechartre greeted her joyfully.

She said: 

“You are reciting verses that I do not know.  I know only Metastasio.  My teacher liked only Metastasio.  What is the hour when the mind has divine visions?”

“Madame, that hour is the dawn of the day.  It may be also the dawn of faith and of love.”