Turpentine! What a nectar for romance! Cartaret made a face that could not have been worse had he swallowed some of the liquid. He tried to protest, but she did not heed him. Instead, she left him standing there while she went to hunt for that accursed bottle. In five minutes she had found it, returned it, thanked him and sent him back to his own room, no further advanced in her acquaintance than when he knocked at her door. She had laughed at him. He returned fiercely to his work, convinced that she had been laughing at him all the while. Very well: what did he care? He would forget her. He concentrated all his thoughts upon the idea of forgetting the Lady of the Rose. In order to assist his purpose, he set a new canvas on his easel and fell to work to make a portrait of her as she should be and was not. The contrast would help him, and the plan was cheap, because it needed no model. By the next afternoon he had completed the portrait of a beautiful woman with a white rose at her throat. It was quite his best piece of work, and an excellent likeness of the girl in the room opposite. He saw that it was a likeness and thought of painting it out, but it would be a pity to destroy his best work, so he merely put it aside. He decided to paint a purely imaginative figure. He squeezed out some paints, almost at haphazard, and began painting in that mood. After forty-eight hours of this sort of thing, he had produced another picture of the same woman in another pose. In more ways than one, Cartaret's position was growing desperate. His money was almost gone. He must paint something that Fourget, or some equally kind-hearted dealer, would buy, and these two portraits he would not offer for sale. Telling himself that it was only to end his obsession, he tried twice again to see the Lady of the Rose, who was now going out daily to some master's class, and each time he gained nothing by his attempt. First, she would not answer his knock, though he could hear her moving about and knew that she must have heard him crossing the hall from his own room and be aware of her caller's identity. On the next occasion, he waited for her at the corner of the Boul' Miche' when he knew that she would be returning from the class, and was greeted by nothing save a formal bow. So he had to force himself to pot-boilers by sheer determination, and finally turned out something that then seemed poor enough for Fourget to like. Houdon came in and found him putting on the finishing touches. The plump musician, frightened by his impudence, had stopped below at his own room on the night of the dinner when the revelers at last came to seek their host. Now it appeared that he was anxious to apologize. He advanced with the dignity befitting a monarch kindly disposed, and his gesturing hands beat the score of the kettle-drums for the march of the priests in _Aïda_.