They left the cafe like a cat it hissed, fur flew figuratively though lively it must be said struck dumb though the dancers were fully for 3 minutes after hanging skirts and robes whispered once more into stillness failing to touch and hold the artist's shoulders.
        They gaped.
        "You'll dry your rouge, and cost me more, get on, get on," Madame 1st whinnied.
        They scowled and grumbled, muttered, bit.
        Madame extemporaneous then hit: "Think no more of her, our Carrie, we called her so in charity for who would have her? The artist? Fools, think! Where she goes. He will not take her for love, Carrie knows not love of man or woman, ever and not ever, she cannot recognize it even in your petting she knows no more of it than ewes and men know that and want no tedium and travail in cold stead of pleasure. Carrie will be his milkmaid but unlike most maids thusly taken Carrie will be in the pens only, the children's pens."
        The dancing women giggled and sniffed the despised barnyard smell, Carrie's, who had served but never serviced them, uncomplaining, with her smile, taking their ragged clothes and their rapid caresses, they could smell it left by her passage. 1 said, "We must do a full spring airing," and the others laughed at piquant wit.
 

On the road milky in color and soft to the sight Carrie looked upon the face of the artist as they proceeded in his coach "to the country," he said.          "To the country," Carrie approved.          Carrie looked, she smiled, and at that light the artist raised a brow. "You're not a man."          "I am an artist. I paint."          "Do you wish to paint me?"          "Perhaps I will."          "With the children?"          "Perhaps I will."          Carrie's mouth could scarcely contain her pleasure and could not her words. "You are a woman."          "Perhaps I am."          Only now and then when a particularly gentle smoke of twilight haze veiled the coppice at the base of the hill and, strangely, all the children were content however briefly  for a quiet to attend only then and not always then did Carrie pause, straighten, lift a hand to her hair, forget it there, and think, remember, what her difference was.          She understood full well the tender love and o'erflowing passion braiding hearts together always ever over women and men women and women men and men women and women and men always over and over in symphony and war and it was ever like the glow and thunder of a battle beyond the hill which was a terror and sad, sad, wearisome toil to see and know but how much sadder still not to.          She knew, Carrie did, she understood full well, she counseled, restored and launched again her children, her many loving children, from her stone stoop, but she did not know it, feel it, the joy and the lance, the wing in soaring flight and beating broken on the stones she did not feel it shut out inexplicably barred from what was said by all to be the common lot.          But after a time not long she guessed for no small hand had come to tug her, no young voice petitioned, well, she thought, remembered, the artist who had come for her in kindness.