On the glass which entombs the picture I see the gently moving and puffing reflection of the fidgety window curtains, and the face of that glazed portrait becomes blurred with broken streaks and all kinds of wave marks.
"Ah, these adventures!" Marie sometimes sighs, at the end of a chapter; "these things that never happen!" "Thank Heaven," I cry.
"Alas," she replies.
Even when people live together they differ more than they think! At other times Marie reads to herself, quite silently.

I surprise her absorbed in this occupation.

It even happens that she applies herself thus to poetry.

In her set and stooping face her eyes come and go over the abbreviated lines of the verses.

From time to time she raises them and looks up at the sky, and--vastly further than the visible sky--at all that escapes from the little cage of words.
And sometimes we are lightly touched with boredom.
* * * * * * One evening Marie informed me that the canary was dead, and she began to cry, as she showed me the open cage and the bird which lay at the bottom, with its feet curled up, as rumpled and stark as the little yellow plaything of a doll.