He bent over his drawing, and only looked at her now and then with the
glance of a painter who simply regards the woman before him as a
model. At first she became pink again; the consciousness that she was
showing her bare arm--which she would have shown in a ball-room
without thinking at all about it--filled her with confusion.
Nevertheless, the young man seemed so reasonable that she became
reassured. The blush left her cheeks, and her lips parted in a vague
confiding smile. And from between her half-opened eyelids she began to
study him. How he had frightened her the previous night with his thick
brown beard, his large head, and his impulsive gestures. And yet he
was not ugly; she even detected great tenderness in the depths of his
brown eyes, while his nose altogether surprised her. It was a
finely-cut woman's nose, almost lost amidst the bristling hair on his
lips. He shook slightly with a nervous anxiety which made his crayon
seem a living thing in his slender hand, and which touched her though
she knew not why. She felt sure he was not bad-natured, his rough,
surly ways arose from bashfulness. She did not decipher all this very
clearly, but she divined it, and began to put herself at her ease, as
if she were with a friend.

Nevertheless, the studio continued to frighten her a little. She cast
sidelong glances around it, astonished at so much disorder and
carelessness. Before the stove the cinders of the previous winter
still lay in a heap. Besides the bed, the small washstand, and the
couch, there was no other furniture than an old dilapidated oaken
wardrobe and a large deal table, littered with brushes, colours, dirty
plates, and a spirit lamp, atop of which was a saucepan, with shreds
of vermicelli sticking to its sides. Some rush-bottomed chairs, their
seats the worse for wear, were scattered about beside spavined easels.
Near the couch the candlestick used on the previous night stood on the