Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/218

 people who had been so good to him and who had seemed so much in love with each other were no longer getting on so well together.

Madame was often contradictory and difficult to please. Sometimes if her judgment upon a painter or a writer was not accepted without question she flounced off in a huff. She wished that Beaulieu would not smoke cigarettes. She wished that he would not eat so much. One needn't be fat if one didn't choose to be fat. Why did he keep her buried in the country? Why couldn't he give up landscape and be a fashionable portrait painter?

All these fault-findings were quite unnecessary and as disagreeable as they were meant to be.

Beaulieu began to confide in Edward.

"Of course I am too old for her," he would say, "but there is nothing sudden about that. And I was always too fat; but she never complained about it before. Just when everything was going along so merrily and happily she pulls these tantrums. And she doesn't seem to care what she says. She knows very well that if I do not live in the country I cannot paint landscapes. And if I cannot paint landscapes I cannot sell landscapes and we would hardly have any money at all. She knows that at my age I cannot turn to portraiture,