“She is doing what Madame Mundanity does on the portal of the cathedral at Basle.”

But Therese, who had been at Basle, did not know Madame Mundanity.  She looked at the figure again, did not understand, and asked: 

“Is it something very bad?  How can a thing shown on the portal of a church be so difficult to tell here?”

Suddenly an anxiety came to her: 

“What will Monsieur and Madame Fusellier think of me?”

Then, discovering on the wall a medallion wherein Dechartre had modelled the profile of a girl, amusing and vicious: 

“What is that?”

“That is Clara, a newspaper girl.  She brought the Figaro to me every morning.  She had dimples in her cheeks, nests for kisses.  One day I said to her:  ‘I will make your portrait.’  She came, one summer morning, with earrings and rings which she had bought at the Neuilly fair.  I never saw her again.  I do not know what has become of her.  She was too instinctive to become a fashionable demi-mondaine.  Shall I take it out?”

“No; it looks very well in that corner.  I am not jealous of Clara.”

It was time to return home, and she could not decide to go.  She put her arms around her lover’s neck.

“Oh, I love you!  And then, you have been to-day good-natured and gay.  Gayety becomes you so well.  I should like to make you gay always.  I need joy almost as much as love; and who will give me joy if you do not?”

CHAPTER XXVII

THE PRIMROSE PATH

After her return to Paris, for six weeks Therese lived in the ardent half sleep of happiness, and prolonged delightfully her thoughtless dream.  She went to see Jacques every day in the little house shaded by a tree; and when they had at last parted at night, she took away with her adored reminiscences.  They had the same tastes; they yielded to the same fantasies.  The same capricious thoughts carried them away.  They found pleasure in running to the suburbs that border the city, the streets where the wine-shops are shaded by acacia, the stony roads where the grass grows at the foot of walls, the little woods and the fields over which extended the blue sky striped by the smoke of manufactories.  She was happy to feel him near her in this region where she did not know herself, and where she gave to herself the illusion of being lost with him.

One day they had taken the boat that she had seen pass so often under her windows.  She was not afraid of being recognized.  Her danger was not great, and, since she was in love, she had lost prudence.  They saw shores which little by little grew gay, escaping the dusty aridity of the suburbs; they went by islands with bouquets of trees shading taverns, and innumerable boats tied under willows.  They debarked at Bas-Meudon.  As she said she was warm and thirsty, he made her enter a wine-shop.  It was a building with wooden galleries, which solitude made to appear larger, and which slept in rustic peace, waiting for Sunday to fill it with the laughter of girls, the cries of boatmen, the odor of fried fish, and the smoke of stews.