She would then go up to her room in order to adjust what I called her glass lamps; and when I would say to her, in the familiar gallantry, which, however, always offended her:
"You are as beautiful as a planet to-day, Miss Harriet," a little blood would immediately mount into her cheeks, the blood of a young maiden, the blood of sweet fifteen.
Then she would become abruptly savage and cease coming to watch me paint. I thought thus:
"This is only a fit of temper she is passing through."
But it did not always pass away. When I spoke to her sometimes, she would answer me, either with an air of affected indifference, or in sullen anger; and became by turns rude, impatient, and nervous. For a time I never saw her except at meals, and we spoke but little. I concluded, at length, that I must have offended her in something: and, accordingly, I said to her one evening:
"Miss Harriet, why is it that you do not act towards me as formerly? What have I done to displease you? You are causing me much pain!"
She responded, in an angry tone, in a manner altogether _sui generis_:
"I be always with you the same as formerly.[4] It is not true, not true," and she ran upstairs and shut herself up in her room.
At times she would look upon me with strange eyes. Since that time I have often said to myself that those who are condemned to death must look thus when they are informed that their last day has come. In her eye there lurked a species of folly, a folly at once mysterious and violent; and even more; a fever, an exasperated desire, impatient, and at once incapable of being realized and unrealizable!
Nay, it seemed to me that there was also going on within her a combat, in which her heart struggled against an unknown force that she wished to overcome, and even, perhaps, something else. But what could I know? What could I know?
For some time I had commenced to work, as soon as daylight appeared, on a picture, the subject of which was as follows:
A deep ravine, steep banks, dominated by two declivities, lined with brambles and long rows of trees, hidden, drowned in that milky vapor, clad in that musty robe which sometimes floats over valleys, at break of day. And at the extreme end of that thick and transparent fog, you see coming or, rather already come, a human couple, a stripling and a maiden, embraced, inter-laced, she, with head leaning on him, he, inclined towards her, and lips to lips.