"Pardon me, dear," she said, "but I think you ought to stop. Every additional stroke of the brush that tones down or paints away anything will make it look less like me. Look at me more carefully--am I really that blooming creature that beams upon the world from out that canvas? Twelve years of denial, loneliness, and living entombment, have they left no trace upon my face? That is the way I might have looked, perhaps, had I known happiness. They say, you know, happiness preserves youth. But I--I am horribly old! And yet, in reality, I have not begun to live!" She turned hastily away and walked to the window. Angelica laid aside her palette, went softly up to her, and threw her arm about her agitated friend. "Julie," said she, "when _you_ speak that way--you, who by a mere smile could tame wild animals and drive tame men mad!" She turned to her comforter, and the tears stood in her eyes. "Oh, my dear," she said, "what nonsense you are talking! How often I have envied a young peasant girl, with an ugly, stupid face, who brought us eggs and milk, simply because she could come and go as she liked, and moved among living beings! But I--can you conceive what it means to have constantly at your side a being whom you cannot but love, and yet whom you are forced to look upon as one dead, as a living ghost; to hear the voice that once caressed you utter senseless sounds, to see the eye that once beamed on you so warmly, strange and dimmed--the eye, the voice, of your own mother? And this, year in and year out--and this half-dead being only waked into anxiety and agitation whenever I made an attempt to leave her. For, truly, when I had borne it a year, I thought I was being crushed by it, without feeling the satisfaction that the sacrifice of my life could be of any possible service to this most miserable being. Yet as often as she missed me for a longer time than the few hours daily to which she had become accustomed, she lapsed into the most violent uneasiness, and only became quiet again when she saw me once more. I had to reconcile myself to the idea that I was necessary to her existence--to an existence that I could by no possibility make happy, or enliven, or even lighten. For so long as I was at her side she scarcely noticed me; indeed, she often appeared not even to recognize me. And still she could not exist without me; and in the asylum, to which she was once carried for the sake of an experiment, she lapsed into a state so pitiable that even 'a girl without a heart' could not but be moved by it." "Horrible! And you lived with her in this way for twelve long years?"