They had never bargained before. In the midst of it Hazelton stopped and looked De Vilmarte over from top to toe. No detail of his charm and of his correctness escaped him. “How are you able to stand it?” he asked. “It must be hard on you, too.” The thought came to him as something new. “Oh,” said Raoul, with awful sarcasm, “you think it is hard on me?” “You must be fond of your mother,” said Hazelton. This time he had not meant to be brutal, and he was sorry to see De Vilmarte wince, but he did not know how to mend matters. “How are we going to break through?” he said. “What end is there for us? I do it for my wife, whom I don’t love, poor wretch, but for whom I feel damned responsible; and you sell your soul to please your mother. And do you get nothing for yourself, I wonder—” He half closed his little eyes, which glinted like jewels between his black lashes. “Appreciation and applause must be pleasant. One can buy as much with stolen money as one can with money earned.... There is only one way out—it is for one of us to die, or for one of _them_. There is death in our little drama, _hein, mon vieux_?” ―――― It was the private exhibition that fixed De Vilmarte’s reputation as an artist. It also marked in his own mind the precariousness of his position. And now the matter was complicated for him because he fell in love with a young girl who cared for his talent as did his mother. She was one of those proud young daughters of France who had no interest in rich and idle young men. Each word of her praise was anguish to him. The praise of the _feuilletons_ he could stand better, because some way they seemed to have nothing to do with him. It was the price which he paid willingly for his mother’s happiness. He cared so much that he had tried not to care for her, and again his mother intervened. It was in every way a suitable match, and his mother told him that she did not wish to die without a grandchild. “You have obligations to your art,” she said, “but your obligations to your race are above those.” She was now very feeble. His wedding and his next _Salon_ picture filled her mind. She was haunted by the presentiment that she would not see the summer come to its close. So Raoul would hurry from her room to Hazelton to see how the picture was coming on. Hazelton was painting as he had never painted before. It seemed, indeed, as if he had a double personality, and as if each one of these personalities was trying to outstrip the other. As happens sometimes to an artist, he had made a sudden leap ahead. No picture that he had painted had the depth or the beauty or the clear, flowing color of this one. But he lagged along. It was as though the beauty of the picture which De Vilmarte was to sign tortured him, and he did not wish to finish it. He would stand before it, lost in the contemplation of its excellences like a devotee, refusing to paint.