“Then I think if what you say is true, an artist ought to keep out of the way of any woman who--cares. But he wouldn’t if she pleased him,” she added softly. François laughed. “In your wisdom you have divined the natural selfishness of man,” he said. As the months passed slowly on, a change, or rather a development gradual but steady, was taking place in Anne’s nature, a development that presently made itself manifest in her appearance, in her attitude, in her demeanour, physical as well as mental. Slowly but surely, she was waking to the consciousness of her womanhood, and of her power. The men whom she had grown to know intimately, regarded her with obvious admiration. In their eyes at least, the eyes of artists, it was evident that she was not as she had hitherto imagined, destitute either of beauty or of attractive charm. _Ah! Voilà sweet Anne Page!_ She had grown used to the frequent exclamation when she appeared in the garden in which at Mrs. Burbage’s desire they were always free to come and go as they pleased. It no longer made her feel embarrassed and uncertain as to its sincerity. Her friends’ admiration for her had become a sort of cult. She was a new type, a woman to be praised--discreetly, with deference--yet praised. They brought to her the incense of a sincere flattery, and to Anne, starved of affection, unconsciously waiting for love, it was very sweet. She accepted it humbly, gratefully, with a surprise as great as her pleasure. But it could not fail to produce results. She began to take pains with her dress, and her natural taste made it easy to adapt the simple gowns she possessed, into becoming garments. When René Dampierre exclaimed how well something suited her, she went to the glass and looked at herself with innocent gratification and astonishment to find that he was right. Her eyes grew softly bright. There was often a faint colour in her cheeks. Even to the unobservant conventional bystander, that summer Anne was charming. If she scarcely recognized herself when she saw her reflection in the glass, the change in her mental personality still further surprised her. By degrees, so slowly, so insensibly that it seemed a natural process, she had found herself, and in making that discovery, she had made others. These men who had seemed so strange and wonderful at first;--beings from another planet, whose thoughts she did not understand, whom she watched with interested amazed eyes, became in one sense very simple people. People easily swayed and managed by a woman older than themselves, a woman naturally intuitive, but hitherto deprived of the opportunity of exercising gifts of which she had only recently become aware. Her conversations with François Fontenelle, as well as her previous wide reading, had removed her ignorance of facts. The rest, now that she was freed from the shackles of self-mistrust, lay well within her natural powers.