"Well, of course, it's only tentative. But don't you think I'd adore Vienna?"

"I don't know. I've never been there."

"Really? Well, then you must come along. Yes, Nicky, you really must come along with me . . . and explore."

He faced her from a velveteen armchair, finished his cognac, and poured another. She told him that he shouldn't drink so much. Then he finally reached for her hand. "Margaretha, I really think we've got to talk."

"About what, Nicky?"

"About us."

She pulled her hand away and turned to the window. She was biting her lower lip.

"Margaretha, I know that I can't give you everything that Rolland gave you—"

"Nicky, please. We can't go back to the way it was."

"Why not?"

"Because it's different now."

"What's different?"

"Everything. You're different. I'm different. We've changed."

She got up and approached the window. There were dried flowers in a vase on the sill—last year's bloom. She absently tore off a petal. It crumbled to nothing.

"Margaretha . . . you don't seem to understand."

"I don't understand what, Nicky?"

"Everywhere I look I see your damn eyes."

For an awful moment he thought she was going to scream, to smash that vase against the wall. But then he saw her face was tracked with tears.

"You're the one who doesn't understand," she said.

"Me?"

"Oh, Nicky, don't you know that I'd only hurt you, that sooner or later I wouldn't be able to stop myself from hurting you? Don't you know that by now?"

He shook his head. "I don't care—"

"But you'd care if it happened. The moment it happened you'd care."

Later, walking along the Montmartre, he must have seen a dozen women as beautiful as Zelle. But in the end there was no end, because she still remained the only one.

He thought about her too much during the days that followed. He thought about Craven, and wished he had had a chance to say he was sorry. He thought about Michard, what he had said.

As December faded to January he found himself returning to the semblance of the life he had led before. He painted through the mornings and early afternoons, then rested and met de Massloff for a drink in the evenings. At one point he even engaged another model, a thin girl with a boyish figure and cropped blond hair. After a modest exhibition of watercolors he spent fifteen days wandering through Italy, compiling a notebook of impressions, moving from one cheap hotel to another.

From a week in Venice there were several wry portraits of children along the canals and comical sketches of young men fishing in the shallows of Chioggia. In Rome he was fascinated with the architecture. In Florence he met a young Englishwoman traveling with an aunt, but it came to nothing.