"No, no, leave me alone. Your pills can do nothing for me. When I do not
work I am bored. I am bored to death, to extinction; my thoughts are the
colour of that water which flows over yonder, brackish and heavy. To be
commencing life, and to be disgusted with it! It is hard. I am reduced
to the point of envying my poor Constance, who passes her days in
her chair, without opening her mouth, but smiling to herself over her
memories of the past. I have not even that, I, happy remembrances to
muse upon. I have only work--work!"

As she talked she went on modelling furiously, now with the
boasting-tool, now with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time
on a little sponge placed on the wooden platform which supported the
group; so that her complaints, her melancholies, inexplicable in the
mouth of a girl of twenty which, in repose, had the purity of a Greek
smile, seemed uttered at random and addressed to no one in particular.

Jenkins, however, appeared disturbed by them, troubled, despite the
evident attention which he gave to the work of the artist, or rather to
the artist herself, to the triumphant grace of this girl whom her beauty
seemed to have predestined to the study of the plastic arts.

Embarrassed by the admiring gaze which she felt fixed upon her, Felicia
resumed:

"Apropos, I have seen him, you know, your Nabob. Some one pointed him
out to me last Friday at the opera."

"You were at the opera on Friday?"

"Yes. The duke had sent me his box."