[The American by Henry James]@TWC D-Link book
The American

CHAPTER IV
18/39

She did advertise, and an old lady wrote her a letter and bade her come and see her.

The old lady liked her, and offered her her living and six hundred francs a year; but Noemie discovered that she passed her life in her arm-chair and had only two visitors, her confessor and her nephew: the confessor very strict, and the nephew a man of fifty, with a broken nose and a government clerkship of two thousand francs.

She threw her old lady over, bought a paint-box, a canvas, and a new dress, and went and set up her easel in the Louvre.
There in one place and another, she has passed the last two years; I can't say it has made us millionaires.

But Noemie tells me that Rome was not built in a day, that she is making great progress, that I must leave her to her own devices.

The fact is, without prejudice to her genius, that she has no idea of burying herself alive.


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