"We'll hang this lot in the dining-room," he said at length, "and those black-and-whites with the oak mountings in the parlor. They'll go best with the wall-paper there."

"Yes, papa."

"And I hope you won't mind, Elfrida," he added, "but I've promised that they shall have one of your paintings to raffle off in the bazar for the alterations in the Sunday-school next week."

"Oh no, papa. I shall be delighted."

Elfrida was sitting beside her mother on the sofa, and at the dose of this proposition Mr. Bell came and sat there too. There was a silence for a moment while they all three confronted the line of pictures leaning against the wall Then Elfrida began to laugh, and she went on laughing, to the astonishment of her parents, until the tears came into her eyes. She stopped as suddenly, kissed her mother and father, and went upstairs. "I'm afraid you've hurt Her feelings, Leslie," said Mrs. Bell, when she had well gone.

But Elfrida's feelings had not been hurt, though one might say that the evening left her sense of humor rather sore. At that moment she was dallying with the temptation to describe the whole scene in a letter to a valued friend in Philadelphia, who would have appreciated it with mirth.

In the end she did not write. It would have been too humiliating.

CHAPTER III.

"_Pas mal, parbleu!_" Lucien remarked, with pursed-out lips, running his fingers through his shock of coa.r.s.e hair, and reflectively scratching the top of his big head as he stepped closer to Nadie Palicsky's elbow, where she stood at her easel in his crowded atelier. The girl turned and looked keenly into his face, seeking his eyes, which were on her work with a considering, interested look. Satisfied, she sent a glance of joyous triumph at a somewhat older woman, whose place was next, and who was listening with the amiable effacement of countenance that is sometimes a more or less successful disguise for chagrin. On this occasion it seemed to fail, for Mademoiselle Palicsky turned her attention to Lucien and her work again with a slight raising of the eyebrows and a slighter sigh. Her face a.s.sumed a gentle melancholy, as if she were pained at the exhibition of a weakness of her s.e.x; yet it was unnecessary to be an acute observer to read there the hope that Lucien's significant phrase had not by any chance escaped her neighbor.

"The drawing of the neck," Lucien went on, "is excellently brutal." Nadie wished he would speak a little louder, but Lucien always arranged the carrying power of his voice according to the susceptibilities of the atelier.

He thrust his hands into his pockets and still stood beside her, looking at her study of the nude model who posed upon a table in the midst of the students. "In you, mademoiselle," he added in a tone yet lower, "I find the woman and the artist divorced. That is a vast advantage--an immense source of power. I am growing more certain of you; you are not merely cleverly eccentric as I thought.

You have a great deal that no one can teach you. You have finished that--I wish to take it downstairs to show the men. It will not be jeered at, I promise you."

"_Cher maitre!_ You mean it?"

"But certainly!"

The girl handed him the study with a look of almost doglike grat.i.tude in her narrow gray eyes. Lucien had never said so much to her before, though the whole atelier had noticed how often he had been coming to her easel lately, and had disparaged her in corners accordingly.

She looked at the tiny silver watch she wore in a leather strap on her left wrist--he had spent nearly five minutes with her this time, watching her work and talking to her, in itself a triumph. It was almost four o'clock, and the winter daylight was going; presently they would all stop work. Partly for the pleasure of being chaffed and envied and complimented in the anteroom in the general washing of brushes, and partly to watch Lucien's rapid progress among the remaining easels, Mademoiselle Palicsky deliberately sat down, in a prematurely vacant chair, slung one slender little limb over the other, and waited.

As she sat there a generous thought rose above her exultation. She hoped everybody else in the atelier had guessed what Lucien was saying to her all that while, and had seen him carry off her day's work, but not the little American. The little American, who was at least thirteen inches taller than Mademoiselle Palicsky, was sufficiently discouraged already, and it was pathetic, in view of almost a year of failure, to see how she clung to her ghost of a talent Besides, the little American admired Nadie Palicsky, her friend, her comrade, quite enough already.

Elfrida had heard, nevertheless. 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 pa.s.sing 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. "Mademoiselle," he said, with visible irritation, "there is nothing to say that I have not said many times already. Your drawing is still ladylike, your color is still pretty, and, _sapristi!_ you have worked with me a year! Still," he added, recollecting himself--Lucien never lost a student by over-candor--"considering your difficult place the shoulders are not so bad. _Continuez_, mademoiselle."

The girl's eyes were fastened immovably upon her work as she sat down again, painting rapidly in an ineffectual, meaningless way, with the merest touch of color in her brush. Her face glowed with the deepest shame that had ever visited her. Lucien was scolding the Swede roundly; she had disappointed him, he said. Elfrida felt heavily how impossible it was that _she_ should disappoint him.

And they had all heard--the English girl in the South Kensington gown, the rich New Yorker, Nadie's rival the Roumanian, Nadie herself; and they were all, except the last, working more vigorously for hearing. Nadie had turned her head away, and so far as the back of a neck and the tips of two ears could express oblivion of what had pa.s.sed, it might have been gathered from hers. But Elfrida knew better, and she resented the pity of the pretence more than if she had met Mademoiselle Palicsky's long light gray eyes full of derisive laughter.

For a year she had been in it and of it, that intoxicating life of the Quartier Latin: so much in it that she had gladly forgotten any former one; so much of it that it had become treason to believe existence supportable under any other conditions. It was her pride that she had felt everything from the beginning; her instinctive apprehension of all that is to be apprehended in the pa.s.sionate, fantastic, vivid life on the left side of the Seine had been a conscious joy from the day she had taken her tiny appartement in the Rue Porte Royale, and bought her colors and sketching-block from a dwarf-like little dealer in the next street, who a.s.sured her proudly that he supplied Henner and Dagnan-Bouveret, and moreover knew precisely what she wanted from experience. "_Moi aussi, mademoiselle, je suis artist!_" She had learned nothing, she had absorbed everything. It seemed to her that she had entered into her inheritance, and that in the possessions that throng the Quartier Latin she was born to be rich. In thinking this she had an Overpowering realization of the poverty of Sparta, so convincing that she found it unnecessary to tell herself that she would never go back there. That was the unconscious pivotal supposition in everything she thought or said or did. After the first bewildering day or two when the exquisite thrill of Paris captured her indefinitely, she felt the full tide of her life turn and flow steadily in a new direction with a delight of revelation and an ecstasy of promise that made nothing in its sweep of every emotion that had not its birth and growth in art, and forbade the mere consideration of anything that might be an obstacle, as if it were a sin.

She entered her new world with proud recognition of its unwritten laws, its unsanctified morale, its riotous overflowing ideals; and she was instant in gathering that to see, to comprehend these was to be thrice blessed, as not to see, not to comprehend them was to dwell in outer darkness with the bourgeois, and the "sandpaper" artists, and others who are without hope. It gave her moments of pure delight to reflect how little "the people" suspected the reality of the existence of such a world notwithstanding all they read and all they professed, and how absolutely exclusive it was in the very nature of nature; how it had its own language untranslatable, its own creed unbelievable, its own customs unfathomable by outsiders, and yet among the true-born how divinely simple recognition was. Her allegiance had the loyalty of every fibre of her being; her scorn of the world she had left was too honest to permit any posing in that regard. The life at Sparta a.s.sumed the colors and very much the significance depicted on a bit of faded tapestry; when she thought of it, it was to groan that so many of her young impressionable years had been wasted there. She h.o.a.rded her years, now that every day and every hour was suffused with its individual pleasure or interest, or that keen artistic pain which also had its value, as a sensation, in the Quartier Latin. It distressed her to think that she was almost twenty-one.

The interminable year that intervened between Elfrida's return from Philadelphia and her triumph in the matter of being allowed to go to Paris to study, she had devoted mainly to the society of the Swiss governess in the Sparta Seminary for young ladies--Methodist Episcopal--with the successful object of getting a working knowledge of French. There had been a certain amount of "young society"

too, and one or two incipient love-affairs, watched with anxious interest by her father and with a harrowed conscience by her mother, who knew Elfrida's capacity for amusing herself; and unlimited opportunities had occurred for the tacit exhibition of her superiority to Sparta, of which she had not always taken advantage. But the significance of the year gathered into the French lessons; it was by virtue of these that the time had a place in her memory. Mademoiselle Joubert supplemented her instruction with a violent affection, a great deal of her society, and the most entertainingly modern of the French novels, which Brentano sent her monthly in enticing packets, her single indulgence. So that after the first confusion of a mult.i.tude of tongues in the irrelevant Parisian key Elfrida found herself reasonably fluent and fairly at ease. The illumined jargon of the atelier staid with her naturally; she never forgot a word or a phrase, and in two months she was babbling and mocking with the rest.

She lived alone; she learned readily to do it on eighty francs a month, and her appartement became charming in three weeks. She divined what she should have there, and she managed to get extraordinary bargains in mystery and history out of the dealers in such things, so cracked and so rusty, so moth-eaten and of such excellent color, that the escape of the combined effect from _ba.n.a.lite_ was a marvel. She had a short, sharp struggle with her American taste for simple elegance in dress, and overthrew it, aiming, with some success, at originality instead.

She found it easy in Paris to invest her striking personality in a distinctive costume, sufficiently becoming and sufficiently odd, of which a broad soft felt hat, which made a delightful brigand of her, and a Hungarian cloak formed important features. The Hungarian cloak suited her so extremely well that artistic considerations compelled her to wear it occasionally, I fear, when other people would have found it uncomfortably warm. In nothing that she said or did or admired or condemned was there any trace of the commonplace, except, perhaps, the desire to avoid it; it had become her conviction that she owed this to herself. She was thoroughly popular in the atelier, her _pet.i.ts soupers_ were so good, her enthusiasms so generous, her drawing so bad. The other pupils declared that she had a head _divinement tragique_, and for those of them she liked she sometimes posed, filling impressive parts in their weekly compositions. They all knew the little appartement in the Rue Porte Royale, more or less well according to the favor with which they were received.

Nadie Palicsky perhaps knew it best--Nadie Palicsky and her friend Monsieur Andre Vambery, who always accompanied her when, she came to Elfrida's in the evening, finding it impossible to allow her to be out alone at night, which Nadie confessed agreeable to her vanity, but a bore.

Elfrida found it difficult in the beginning to admire the friend. He was too small for dignity, and Nadie's inspired comparison of his long black hair to "_serpents noirs_" left her unimpressed. Moreover she thought she detected about him a personal odor which was neither that of sanct.i.ty nor any other abstraction. It took time and conversation and some acquaintance with values as they obtain at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the knowledge of what it meant to be "selling," to lift Monsieur Vambery to his proper place in her regard. After that she blushed that he had ever held any other. But from the first Elfrida had been conscious of a kind of pride in her unshrinking acceptance of the situation. She and Nadie had exchanged a pledge of some sort, when Mademoiselle Palicsky bethought herself of the unconfessed fact. She gave Elfrida a narrow look, and then leaned back in her low chair and bent an imperturbable gaze upon the slender spiral of blue smoke that rose from the end of her cigarette.

"It is necessary now that you should know, pet.i.te--n.o.body else does, Lucien would be sure to make a fuss, but--I have a lover, and we have decided about marriage that it is ridiculous. It is a _brave ame_. You ought to know him; but if it makes any difference--"

Elfrida reflected afterward with satisfaction that she had not even changed color, though she had found the communication electric. It seemed to her that there had been something dignified, n.o.ble almost, in the answer she had made, with a smile that acknowledged the fact that the world had scruples on such accounts as these:

"_Cela m'est absolument egal!_"

So far as the life went it was perfect. The Quartier spoke and her soul answered it, and the world had nothing to compare with a conversation like that. But the question of production, of achievement, was beginning to bring her moments when she had a terrible sensation that the temperature of her pa.s.sion was chilled. She had not yet seen despair, but she had now and then lost her hold of herself, and she had made acquaintance with fear. There had been no vivid realization of failure, but a problem was beginning to form in her mind, and with it a distinct terror of the solution, which sometimes found a shape in her dreams. In waking, voluntary moments she would see her problem only as an unanswerable enigma.

Yet in the beginning she had felt a splendid confidence.

Her appropriation of theory had been so brilliant and so rapid, her instructive appreciation had helped itself out so well with the casual formulas of the schools, she seemed to herself to have an absolute understanding of expression. She held her social place among the others by her power of perception, and that, with the completeness of her repudiation of the bourgeois, had given her Nadie Palicsky, whom the rest found difficult, variable, unreasonable. Elfrida was certain that if she might only talk to Lucien she could persuade him of a great deal about her talent that escaped him--she was sore it escaped him--in the mere examination of her work. It chafed her always that her personality could not touch the master; that she must day after day be only the dumb, submissive pupil. She felt sometimes that there were things she might say to Lucien which would be interesting and valuable for him to hear.

Lucien was always non-committal for the first few months.

Everybody said so, and it was natural enough. Elfrida set her teeth against his silences, his casual looks and ambiguous encouragements for a length of time which did infinite credit to her determination. She felt herself capable of an eternity of pain; she was proudly conscious of a willingness to oppose herself to innumerable discouragements--to back her talent, as it were, against all odds. That was historic, dignified, to be expected!

But in the inmost privacy of her soul she had conceived the character of the obstacles she was prepared to face, and the list resolutely excluded any idea that it might not be worth while. Indifference and contempt cut at the very roots of her pledges to herself. As she sat listening on this afternoon to the vivid terms of Lucien's disapproval of what the Swede had done, she had a sharp consciousness of this severance.

She had nothing to say to any one in the general babble of the anteroom, and n.o.body notified her white face and resolute eyes particularly--the Americans were always so pale and so _exalte_. Nadie kept away from her.

Elfrida had to cross the room and bring her, with a little touch of angry a.s.sertion upon the arm, from the middle of the group she had drawn around her, on purpose, as her friend knew.

"I want you to dine with me--really _dine_," she said, and her voice was both eager and repressed. "We win go to Babaudin's--one gets an excellent haricot there--and you shall have that little white cheese that you love.

Come! I want you particularly. I will even make him bring champagne--anything."

Nadie gave her a quick look and made a little theatrical gesture of delight.

"_Quell bonheur!_" she cried for the benefit of the others; and then in a lower tone: "But not Babaudins, pet.i.te. Andre will not permit Babaudin's; he says it is not _convenable_," and she threw up her eyes with mock resignation. "Say Papaud's. They keep their feet off the table at Papaud's--there are fewer of those _betes des Anglais_."

"Papaud's is cheaper," Elfrida returned darkly. "The few Englishmen who dine at Babaudin's behave perfectly well. I will not be insulted about the cost. I'll be answerable to Andre. You don't lie as a general thing, and why now? I can afford it, truly. You need not be distressed."

Mademoiselle Palicsky looked into the girl's tense face for an instant, and laughed a gay a.s.sent. But to herself she said, as she finished drying her brushes on an inconceivably dirty bit of cotton: "She has found herself out, she has come to the truth. She has discovered that it is not in her, and she is coming to me for corroboration.

Well, I will not give it, me! It is extremely disagreeable, and I have not the courage. _Pourquoi donc!_ I will send her to Monsieur John Kendal; she may make him responsible.

He will break her, but he will not lie to her; they sacrifice all to their consciences, those English! And now, you good-natured fool, you are in for a devil of an evening!"

CHAPTER IV.

"Three months more," Elfrida Bell said to herself next morning, in the act of boiling an egg over a tiny kerosene stove in the cupboard that served her as a kitchen, "and I will put it to every test I know. Three unflinching months! John Kendal will not have gone back to England by that time. I shall still get his opinion. If he is only as encouraging as Nadie was last night, dear thing!

I almost forgave her for being so much, much cleverer than I am. Oh, letters!" as a heavy knock repeated itself upon the door of the room outside.

There was only one; it was thrust beneath the door, showing a white triangle to her expectancy as she ran out to secure it, while the fourth flight creaked under Madame Vamousin descending. She picked it up with a light heart--she was young and she had slept. Yesterday's strain had pa.s.sed; she was ready to count yesterday's experience among the things that must be met. Nadie had been so sensible about it. This was a letter from home, and the American mail was not due until next day. Inside there would be news of a little pleasure trip to New York, which her father and mother had been planning lately --Elfrida constantly urged upon her parents the necessity of amusing themselves--and a remittance. The remittance would be more than usually welcome, for she was a little in debt--a mere trifle, fifty or sixty francs; but Elfrida hated being in debt. She tore the end of the envelope across with absolute satisfaction, which was only half chilled when she opened out each of the four closely written sheets of foreign letter-paper in turn and saw that the usual postal order was not there.

Having ascertained this however, she went back to her egg; in another ten seconds it would have been hard-boiled, a thing she detested. There was the, egg, and there was some apricot-jam--the egg in a slender-stemmed Arabian silver cup, the jam golden in a little round dish of wonderful old blue. She set it forth, with the milk-bread and the b.u.t.ter and the coffee, on a bit of much mended damask with a pattern of rosebuds and a coronet in one corner. Her breakfast gave her several sorts of pleasure.

Half an hour after it was over she was still sitting with the letter in her lap. It is possible to imagine that she looked ugly. Her dark eyes had a look of persistence in spite of fear, a line or two shot up from between her brows, her lips were pursed a little and drawn down at the corners, her chin thrust forward. Her face and her att.i.tude helped each other to express the distinctest possible negative. Her neck had an obstinate bend; she leaned forward clasping her knees, for the moment a creature of rigid straight lines. She had hardly moved since she read the letter.

She was sorry to learn that her father had been unfortunate in business, that the Illinois Indubitable Insurance Company had failed. At his age the blow would be severe, and the prospect, after a life of comparative luxury, of subsisting even in Sparta on eight hundred dollars a year could not be an inviting one for either of her parents.