to a tenor.  But that instinct, almost abnormal, had been developed, cultivated to excess, by the energy of will in refinement, a trait so marked in the Anglo-Saxons of the New World when they like Europe, instead of detesting it.  For the time being, the longing for refinement seemed reduced to the passionate inhalations of that divine, fair rose of love which was Madame Steno, a rose almost too full-blown, and which the autumn of forty years had begun to fade.  But she was still charming.  And how little Maitland heeded the fact that his wife was in the room near by, the windows of which cast forth a light which caused to stand out more prominently the shadow of the voluptuous terrace!  He held his mistress’s hand within his own, but abandoned it when he perceived Dorsenne, who took particular pains to move a chair noisily on approaching the couple, and to say, in a loud voice, with a merry laugh: 

“I should have made a poor gallant abbe of the last century, for at night I can really see nothing.  If your cigarette had not served me as a beacon-light I should have run against the balustrade.”

“Ah, it is you, Dorsenne,” replied Madame Steno, with a sharpness contrary to her habitual amiability, which proved to the novelist that first of all he was the “inconvenient third” of the classical comedies, then that Hafner had reported his imprudent remarks of the day before.

“So much the better,” thought he, “I shall have forewarned her.  On reflection she will be pleased.  It is true that at this moment there is no question of reflection.”  As he said those words to himself, he talked aloud of the temperature of the day, of the probabilities of the weather for the morrow, of Ardea’s good-humor.  He made, indeed, twenty trifling remarks, in order to manage to leave the terrace and to leave the lovers to their tete-a-tete, without causing his withdrawal to become noticeable by indiscreet haste, as disagreeable as suggestive.

“When may we come to your atelier to see the portrait finished, Maitland?” he asked, still standing, in order the better to manage his retreat.

“Finished?” exclaimed the Countess, who added, employing a diminutive which she had used for several weeks:  “Do you then not know that Linco has again effaced the head?”

“Not the entire head,” said the painter, “but the face is to be done over.  You remember, Dorsenne, those two canvases by Pier delta Francesca, which are at Florence, Duc Federigo d’Urbino and his wife Battista Sforza.  Did you not see them in the same room with La Calomnie by Botticelli, with a landscape in the background?  It is drawn like this,” and he made a gesture with his thumb, “and that is what I am trying to obtain, the necessary curve on which all faces depend.  There is no better painter in Italy.”

“And Titian and Raphael?” interrupted Madame Steno.

“And the Sienese and the Lorenzetti, of whom you once raved?  You wrote to me of them, with regard to my article on your exposition of ’eighty-six; do you remember?” inquired the writer.