She had studied art under him, and between artist and pupil lay that mysterious bond which unites craftsmen. For Maxine was great in knowledge and power, and above all in that instinct without which an artist is at best an animated brush, a pencil under the dominion of mechanical force.
As she wrote, she little dreamed that the sympathy burning in her heart and moving to eloquence her pen, was a thing born not from the sufferings of an afflicted people, but of the love of a man. A child of her mind begotten by the man she had just left, and whom, that night, she had learned to love.
Pugin lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He had begun life quite low down in the Parisian world on the quays as apprentice to Manasis, a jew book-dealer, who has been dead twenty-five years, whose money has been dispersed, whose name has been forgotten, of whom nothing remains on earth but the few hours a day of time filched from him by Pugin.
Pugin had a hard and bitter fight for twenty years before he obtained recognition. The garret and starvation act had been unduly prolonged in the case of this genius, and it seemed a mystery where and how in the ruined city which is at the heart of every city, in that _cour des Miracles_ where the Bohemians camp, he had found, like a crystal vase, his exquisite style, preserved it unbroken by mischance or shock of fate, and carried it safely at last to the hands of Fame.
He was very rich now, very powerful, and very fortunate. Charitable, too, and ever ready to assist a fellow-worker in straitened circumstances, and to-day as he sat reading in the cool recesses of his library, and listening to the sound of the Paris he loved floating in with the warm June air through the open window, he felt at peace with all the world and in a mood to do justice to his bitterest enemy.
The striped sun-blinds filtered the blaze outside, letting pass only a diffused and honey-coloured twilight; a great bowl of roses filled the room with the simple and deep poetry of summer, the story of the hedges and the fields, of orchards shot through with the voices of birds, of cattle knee-deep in cool water where the dragon-flies keep up their eternal dance to the flute-like ripple of the river amidst the reeds.