till you _see_ her."

Joyselle's delight in the artistic timeliness of the speech found vent
in his putting his arm round his companion's slim waist and giving her a
hearty, paternal hug. Her whole face, in the darkness, quivered with
amusement. She had never in her whole life been so thoroughly and
satisfactorily amused. Then, having gone forward as far as his now
simply restraining hold would let her, she looked down into the kitchen.

It was a large room, snowy with whitewash as to walls and ceiling,
spotless as to floor. At the far end of it, opposite a pagoda-like and
beautiful but apparently unlighted modern English stove, was a huge,
deep, cavernous fireplace, unlike any the girl had ever seen. It was, in
fact, a perfect copy of a Norman fireplace, with stone seats at the
sides, an old-fashioned spit, and the fire burning lustily on the floor
of it, unhemmed by dogs or grate. On a long, sand-scoured table in the
middle of the room sat Théo, in his shirt-sleeves, deftly breaking eggs
into a big, green-lined bowl, while before the fire, gently swinging to
and fro over the flames a saucepan with an abnormally long
handle--Madame Joyselle. Her short, dark-clad figure, half-covered with
a blue apron, showed all its too-generous curves as she bent forward,
and when, at Théo's remark, she turned to him with a smile, she showed a
round, wrinkled, rosy face and small blue eyes that wrinkled with
sympathetic kindness. "She is beautiful, my little bit of cabbage?"

Théo broke the last egg, sat down the bowl, and got down from the table.
"Tannier--you remember him? The man who painted everybody last
winter--said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen." The
pride in his voice was good to hear.