Claude by this time grew conscious of having a woman’s care around him. In order to make her sit down and chat quietly, he would ask her now and then to sew a torn cuff or coat-tail. She herself had offered to look over his linen; but it was no longer with the ardour of a housewife, eager to be up and doing. First of all, she hardly knew how to work; she held her needle like a girl brought up in contempt of sewing. Besides, the enforced quiescence and the attention that had to be given to such work, the small stitches which had to be looked to one by one, exasperated her. Thus the studio was bright with cleanliness like a drawing-room, but Claude himself remained in rags, and they both joked about it, thinking it great fun. How happy were those months that they spent together, those four months of frost and rain whiled away in the studio, where the red-hot stove roared like an organ-pipe! The winter seemed to isolate them from the world still more. When the snow covered the adjacent roofs, when the sparrows fluttered against the window, they smiled at feeling warm and cosy, at being lost, as it were, amidst the great silent city. But they did not always confine themselves to that one little nook, for she allowed him at last to see her home. For a long while she had insisted upon going away by herself, feeling ashamed of being seen in the streets on a man’s arm. Then, one day when the rain fell all of a sudden, she was obliged to let him come downstairs with an umbrella. The rain having ceased almost immediately, she sent him back when they reached the other side of the Pont Louis-Philippe. They only remained a few moments beside the parapet, looking at the Mail, and happy at being together in the open air. Down below, large barges, moored against the quay, and full of apples, were ranged four rows deep, so close together that the planks thrown across them made a continuous path for the women and children running to and fro. They were amused by the sight of all that fruit, those enormous piles littering the banks, the round baskets which were carried hither and thither, while a strong odour, suggestive of cider in fermentation, mingled with the moist gusts from the river.