meadows of love had been ransacked, and the artist had gathered roses
and cornflowers as the children do, so greedily that he did not see
that his hands could hold no more, the scene changed. When the painter
showed his wife the sketches for his finest compositions he heard her
exclaim, as her father had done, "How pretty!" This tepid admiration
was not the outcome of conscientious feeling, but of her faith on the
strength of love.

Augustine cared more for a look than for the finest picture. The only
sublime she knew was that of the heart. At last Theodore could not
resist the evidence of the cruel fact--his wife was insensible to
poetry, she did not dwell in his sphere, she could not follow him in
all his vagaries, his inventions, his joys and his sorrows; she walked
groveling in the world of reality, while his head was in the skies.
Common minds cannot appreciate the perennial sufferings of a being
who, while bound to another by the most intimate affections, is
obliged constantly to suppress the dearest flights of his soul, and to
thrust down into the void those images which a magic power compels him
to create. To him the torture is all the more intolerable because his
feeling towards his companion enjoins, as its first law, that they
should have no concealments, but mingle the aspirations of their
thought as perfectly as the effusions of their soul. The demands of
nature are not to be cheated. She is as inexorable as necessity, which
is, indeed, a sort of social nature. Sommervieux took refuge in the
peace and silence of his studio, hoping that the habit of living with
artists might mould his wife and develop in her the dormant germs of
lofty intelligence which some superior minds suppose must exist in
every being. But Augustine was too sincerely religious not to take
fright at the tone of artists. At the first dinner Theodore gave, she
heard a young painter say, with the childlike lightness, which to her