The tall, slim, lithe girl, walking swiftly through the sweet spring twilight looked like the personification of spring-time with her fresh young face, her dewy dark eyes, her sensitive mobile young mouth, red as a dark red rose. She looked like Youth itself, welcoming in the new season. Several people glanced after her, and smiled with sympathy for her freshness and bloom and untouched virginal candor. CHAPTER XL I Paris, May, 1908. Eugenia had been complaining that her new teacher in advanced French diction was very ill-natured and exacting, and had asked Marise to go with her to a lesson to back her up in a protest against his unreasonable demands. The two girls drove up to the Francais in Eugenia's inevitable cab, and leaving her inevitable maid to wait in it, passed through the dingy little side-door into an ill-lighted corridor and felt their way toilsomely up a stairway not lighted at all. A dingy, stone-colored corridor with painted and numbered doors on each side, like a needy old-man's home or ill-kept reformatory. A knock at one of these, opened by a bald, pale, elderly man, with a knobby nose and several chins. A tiny, cluttered, stuffy room, with a lumpy sofa, two chairs, an easel and a window. After her presentation to M. Vaudoyer, Marise sat down on one of the hard chairs to await developments. The actor was in a long, paint-stained blouse, and excused himself by saying that his pupil was a little ahead of time, "A real American," he said, smiling at both of them. He had been painting, he explained, waving a wrinkled old hand towards a canvas on an easel. "Oh, you are twice an artist," remarked Marise, doing as she had been taught to do, automatically turning a pretty speech. As a matter of fact, she thought the sketch anything but artistic. The old man's face clouded. "To be a painter, that was all I ever wanted," he said, looking with affection at the very mediocre landscape, and adding sadly, "All my life ... all my life." "But to have been--to be such an artist as you are on the stage--surely that ought to be enough," said Marise. This time she spoke sincerely, out of a very genuine admiration for his acting. "One does what one can, what one can," said the old man, resignedly, unbuttoning his blouse and dragging it off, revealing snuffy and crumpled black garments. He looked, thought Marise, like the parish priest of a very poor and neglected parish. And he had been for years--why, for a life-time, one of the most solidly esteemed and admired actors in the finest theatrical company in the world. "What more does any man want?" Marise asked herself, wondering why his face in repose was so bitter and melancholy. Before beginning his lesson, he gave a last look at his painting, "What do you think of it? What do you think of it?" he asked suddenly, turning on Marise, the question like a loaded revolver at her temple.