While he painted slowly, he arrived at this conclusion by small arguments, precise, clear, and sure; he now felt himself strong, steady, and master of the situation.  He had only to be prudent, patient, devoted, and one day or another she would again be his.

He knew how to wait.  In order to reassure her and to conquer her once more, he practised ruses in his turn; he assumed a tenderness restrained by apparent remorse, hesitating attentions, and indifferent attitudes.  Tranquil in the certainty of approaching happiness, what did it matter whether it arrived a little sooner, a little later?  He even experienced a strange, subtle pleasure in delay, in watching her, and saying to himself, “She is afraid!” as he saw her coming always with her child.

He felt that between them a slow work of reconciliation was going on, and thought that in the Countess’s eyes was something strange:  constraint, a sweet sadness, that appeal of a struggling soul, of a faltering will, which seems to say:  “But—­conquer me, then!”

After a while she came alone once more, reassured by his reserve.  Then he treated her as a friend, a comrade; he talked to her of his life, his plans, his art, as to a brother.

Deluded by this attitude, she assumed joyfully the part of counselor, flattered that he distinguished her thus above other women, and convinced that his talent would gain in delicacy through this intellectual intimacy.  But, from consulting her and showing deference to her, he caused her to pass naturally from the functions of a counselor to the sacred office of inspirer.  She found it charming to use her influence thus over the great man, and almost consented that he should love her as an artist, since it was she that gave him inspiration for his work!

It was one evening, after a long talk about the loves of illustrious painters, that she let herself glide into his arms.  She rested there this time, without trying to escape, and gave him back his kisses.

She felt no remorse now, only the vague consciousness of a fall; and to stifle the reproaches of her reason she attributed it to fatality.

Drawn toward him by her virgin heart and her empty soul, the flesh overcome by the slow domination of caresses, little by little she attached herself to him, as do all tender women who love for the first time.

With Olivier it was a crisis of acute love, sensuous and poetic.  It seemed to him sometimes that one day he had taken flight, with hands extended, and that he had been able to clasp in full embrace that winged and magnificent dream which is always hovering over our hopes.

He had finished the Countess’s portrait, the best, certainly, that he ever had painted, for he had discovered and crystallized that inexpressible something which a painter seldom succeeds in unveiling—­that reflection, that mystery, that physiognomy of the soul, which passes intangibly across a face.