He had dreamed of perfect beauty. He believed that he had found it in the creations of his brush. He was probably mistaken; for it is impossible to create a divine image without giving it human features, and nothing on earth is blessed with absolute perfection. However that may have been, Michel, still faltering and awkward in his art in several respects, had approached as nearly as possible to perfect beauty in his types. That was what impressed all those who examined his work; above all, that was what impressed him when he sought among real persons the personification of his ideas. Among the whole number he saw only two or three women who seemed truly beautiful, and even those two or three he would have liked to hold against his canvas, in order to take away from one or give to another a certain outline or a certain coloring, wherein they seemed to him to lack fullness or purity. He was perfectly cool,--cool as an artist analyzing a figure,--and he realized that the human countenance made up for its shortcomings in the way of perfection of feature solely by the expression of life. "I have drawn more beautiful faces," he said to himself, "but they are not true. They do not think, they do not breathe, they do not love. It would be better that they should be less beautiful and more animate. When I roll up these canvases to-morrow, I will destroy them all, and then I will change them, and, it may be, overturn all the ideas which have guided me hitherto." And he abandoned the quest for ideal perfection of form among the living dancers whom he was studying, to watch their movements, their grace, the attitudes of the body, the expression of the glance and smile; in a word, the secret of life. Enchanted at first, he felt that he grew cold once more as he analyzed each being by itself. In all probability there are many ingenuous souls among women and among men; but there are very few ingenuous faces to be found at a ball in fashionable society. People there assume expressions which are almost always at variance with their characters, whether they are seeking to attract or to shun attention. Michel fancied that he could see that some were hypocritically concealing their vanity, while others arrogantly flaunted it; that this girl, who desired to seem amorous, was cold and blasé; that the gayety of that other was dismal, and the melancholy of a third a pretence. A parvenu strove to assume the air of a man of noble birth; a noble strove to adopt the bearing of a man of the people. Everybody posed more or less. The most humble tried to seem self-possessed, and even touching timidity struggled to avoid the awkwardness which triumphed over its efforts.