Page:Short Stories (1912).djvu/105

98 She was a familiar voice to us, a being, an interest. She said all she thought, listened to her own instinctive feelings, and expressed ideas of nature. We named her Folly. We did not know how she first came to the colony, and no one remembered not having seen her there.

On my return from quite a long journey, I inquired from one of the members of our colony about her. "I've not seen her for months. It is an age since she has been here. She must be dead."

Nothing more was said or thought of her. Artists are careless fellows, we must admit, and women make a sorry mistake to love them.

One morning about the beginning of May, 1855, I was walking through the grand Avenue of Neuilly. I was going to breakfast at the Porte Maillot. I say this for the curious. I had been working steadily for days, and felt the need of giving myself the relaxation of a morning stroll and a country frolic, to establish an equilibrium between the spirit and the flesh, as Zabier de Maistre would say. As I neared the top of the fortifications, I saw the people, particularly the men, walking in an opposite direction from the one I was taking, stop and turn. Some were laughing, others were making that little sound of the lips which is a call for dogs, eats and other animals, and continuing on their way with a sneering air. What silliness!

After quickening my step, I saw quite in the middle of the road, a white kid, jumping, caracoling, by times stopping, running back and forth with the gawky activity natural to young quarupedsquadrupeds [sic] when they first feel the earth under their feet, particularly noticeable in the goat kind.

Twenty feet in front of the kid, whose neck had a blue ribbon around it, to which was attached a bell, stood a young women, dressed in a white striped marsailles, made in the picturesque Louis XV style, her face shaded by a large straw hat trimmed with natural