It did not cost Mariano anything to do her this favor. She
loved him dearly, so dearly, and she would love him still more if he
respected her prejudices. He might call her bourgeois, a common ordinary
soul, but that was what she wanted to be, just as she always had been.
Besides, what was the need of painting naked women? Couldn't he do other
things? She urged him to paint children in smocks and sandals, curly
haired and chubby, like the child Jesus; old peasant women with
wrinkled, copper-colored faces, bald-headed ancients with long beards;
character studies, but no young women, understand? No naked beauties!
Renovales said "yes" to everything, drawing close to him that beloved
form still trembling with its past rage. They clung to each other with a
sort of anxiety, desirous of forgetting what had happened, and the night
ended peacefully for Renovales in the happiness of reconciliation.
When summer came they rented a little villa at Castel-Gandolfo. Cotoner
had gone to Rivoli in the train of a cardinal and the married couple
lived in the country accompanied only by a couple of maids and a
manservant, who took care of Renovales' painting kit.
Josephina was perfectly contented in this retirement, far from Rome,
talking with her husband at all hours, free from the anxiety that filled
her, when he was working in his studio. For a month Renovales remained
in placid idleness. His art seemed forgotten; the boxes of paints, the
easels, all the artistic luggage brought from Rome, remained packed up
and forgotten in a shed in the garden.
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