important thing . . . how shall I put it? This little Undine had risen out of the black waters of the Latin Quarter and attached herself to a mortal. What is it that love gains for Undines?
"Que veux-tu?" cried P'tit-Bleu. "I am fond of him. I can't bear to see him ruining himself. I must do what I can."
And the Quarter said, "Ho-ho! You chaps who didn't believe it was a collage! He-he! What do you say now? She's chucked up everything, to go and live in the country with him."
In August or September I ran down to the farm-house near Villiers-St.-Jacques, and passed a week with them. I found a mightily changed Monsieur Edouard, and a curiously changed P'tit-Bleu, as well. He was fat and rosy, he who had been so thin and white. And she—she was grave. Yes, P'tit-Bleu was grave: sober, staid, serious. And her impish, mocking black eyes shone with a strange, serious, calm light.
Monsieur Edouard (with whom my relations had long before this become confidential) drew me apart, and told me he was having an exceedingly bad time of it.
"She's really too absurd, you know. She's a martinet, a tyrant. Opium is to me what tobacco is to you, and does me no more harm. I need it for my work. Oh, in moderation; of course one can be excessive. Yet she refuses to let me have a tenth of my proper quantity. And besides, how utterly senseless it is, keeping me down here in the country. I'm dying of ennui. There's not a person I can have any sort of intellectual sympathy with, for miles in every direction. An artist needs the stimulus of contact with his fellows. It's indispensable. If she'd only let me run upto
