"I will kill her!"

"My dear----"

"She is in love with that little cavalry colonel, because he rides
well----"

"Theodore!"

"Let me be!" said the painter in a tone almost like a roar.

It would be odious to describe the whole scene. In the end the frenzy
of passion prompted the artist to acts and words which any woman not
so young as Augustine would have ascribed to madness.

At eight o'clock next morning Madame Guillaume, surprising her
daughter, found her pale, with red eyes, her hair in disorder, holding
a handkerchief soaked with tears, while she gazed at the floor strewn
with the torn fragments of a dress and the broken fragments of a large
gilt picture-frame. Augustine, almost senseless with grief, pointed to
the wreck with a gesture of deep despair.

"I don't know that the loss is very great!" cried the old mistress of
the Cat and Racket. "It was like you, no doubt; but I am told that
there is a man on the boulevard who paints lovely portraits for fifty
crowns."

"Oh, mother!"