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
