Page:Pierre and Luce.djvu/54

44 took the color sketches from him and burst out laughing.

"Ha! So they're even uglier than you had expected?"

He said, greatly annoyed:

"But why, why do you make things like these?"

She examined his upset visage with a kindly smile of maternal irony; this dear little bourgeois for whom everything had been so easy and who could not conceive that one must make concessions for. ..

He asked once more:

"Why? Tell me, why?"

(He was quite crestfallen, as if it was he who was the botcher in paint! . . . Dear little boy! She would have liked to kiss him . . . very properly, on his forehead!)

She answered gently:

"Why, in order to live."

He was quite overcome. He had never dreamed of it.

"Life is complicated," she went on in a light and mocking tone. "In the first place