She listened eagerly, tensely, as she always did when Lucien opened his lips in her neighborhood.

When she saw him take the sketch to show in the men's atelier downstairs, to exhibit to that horde of animals below, whose studies and sketches and compositions were so constantly brought up for the stimulus and instruction of Lucien's women students, she grew suddenly so white that the girl who worked next her, a straw-colored Swede, asked her if she were ill, and offered her a little green bottle of salts of lavender.
"It's that beast of a calorifere," the Swede said, nodding at the hideous black cylinder that stood near them, "they will always make it too hot." Elfrida waved the salts back hastily--Lucien was coming her way.

She worked seated, and as he seemed on the point of passing with merely a casual glance and an ambiguous "H'm!" she started up.

The movement effectually arrested him, unintentional though it seemed.

He frowned slightly, thrusting his hands deep into his coat-pockets, and looked again.
"We must find a better place for you, mademoiselle; you can make nothing of it here so close to the model, and below him thus." He would have gone on, but in spite of his intention to avert his eyes he caught the girl's glance, and something infinitely appealing in it stayed him again.