LITMIR.BIZ

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but she had her way. The Bonnie Lassie always does. So the bare studio was from time to time irradiated with Bobbie Holland’s youthful loveliness and laughter. For there was much laughter between those two. Shrewdly foreseeing that this bird of paradise would return to the bare cage only if it were made amusing for her, Julien exerted himself to the utmost to keep her mind at play, and, as I can vouch who helped train him, there are few men of his age who can be as absorbing a companion as Julien when he chooses to exert his charm. All the time, he was working with a passionate intensity on the portrait; letting everything else go; tossing aside the most remunerative offers; leaving his mail unopened; throwing himself intensely, recklessly, into this one single enterprise. The fact is, he had long been starved for color and was now satiating his soul with it. Probably it was largely impersonal with him at first. The Bonnie Lassie, wise of heart that she is, thinks so. But that could not last. Men who are not otherwise safeguarded do not long retain a neutral attitude toward such creatures of grace and splendor as Bobbie Holland.

      Between them developed a curious relation. It was hardly to be called friendship; he was not, to Bobbie’s recognition, a habitant of her world. Nor, certainly, was it anything more. Julien would as soon have renounced easel and canvas as have taken advantage of her coming to make love to her. In this waif of our gutters and ward of our sidewalk artist inhered a spirit of the most punctilious and rigid honor, the gift, perhaps, of some forgotten ancestry. More and more, as the intimacy grew, he deserted his uptown haunts and stuck to the attic studio above the rooms where, in the dawning days of prosperity, he had installed Peter Quick Banta in the effete and scandalous luxury of two rooms, a bath, and a gas stove. Yet the picture advanced slowly which is the more surprising in that the exotic Bobbie seemed to find plenty of time for sittings now. Between visits she took to going to the Metropolitan Museum and conscientiously studying pictures and catalogues with a view to helping her protégé form sound artistic tastes. (When the Bonnie Lassie heard that, she all but choked.) As for Julien!

      “This is all very well,” he said, one day in the sculptress’s studio; “but sooner or later she’s going to catch me at it.”

      “What then?” asked the Bonnie Lassie, not looking up from her work.

      “She’ll go away.”

      “Let her go. Your portrait will be finished meantime, won’t it?”

      “Oh, yes. That’ll be finished.”

      This time the Bonnie Lassie did look up. Immediately she looked back again.

      “In any case she’ll have to go away some day—won’t she?”

      “I suppose so,” returned he in a gloomy growl.

      “I warned you at the outset, ‘Dangerous,’ ” she pointed out.

      They let it drop there. As for the effect upon the girl of Julien Tenny’s brilliant and unsettling personality, I could judge only as I saw them occasionally together, she lustrous and exotic as a budding orchid, he in the non-descript motley of his studio garb, serenely unconscious of any incongruity.

      “Do you think,” I asked the Bonnie Lassie, who was sharing my bench one afternoon as Julien was taking the patroness of Art over to where her car waited, “that she is doing him as much good as she thinks she is, or ought to?”

      “Malice ill becomes one of your age, Dominie,” said the Bonnie Lassie with dignity.

      “I’m quite serious,” I protested.

      “And very unjust. Bobbie is an adorable little person, when you know her.”

      “Does Julien know her well enough to have discovered a self-evident fact?”

      “Only,” pursued my companion, ignoring the question, “she is bored and a little spoiled.”

      “So she comes down here to escape being bored and to get more spoiled.”

      “Julien won’t spoil her.”

      “He certainly doesn’t appear to bore her.”

      “She’s having the tables turned on her without knowing it. Julien is doing her a lot of good. Already she’s far less beneficent and bountiful and all that sort of stuff.”

      “Lassie,” said I, “what, if I may so express myself, is the big idea?”

      “Slang is an execrable thing from a professed scholar,” she reproved. “However, the big idea is that Julien is really painting. And it’s mine, that big idea.”

      “Mightn’t it be accompanied by a little idea to the effect that the experience is likely to cost him pretty dear? What will be left when Bobbie Holland goes?”

      “Pooh! Don’t be an oracular sphinx,” was all that I got for my pains.

      Nor did Miss Bobbie show any immediate symptoms of going. If the painting seemed at times in danger of stagnation, the same could not be said of the fellowship between painter and paintee. That nourished along, and one day a vagrant wind brought in the dangerous element of historical personalities. The wind, entering at the end of a session, displaced a hanging above the studio door, revealing in bold script upon the plastering Béranger’s famous line:

      “Dans un grenier qu’on est bien á vingt ans!”

      “Did you write that there?” asked the girl.

      “Seven long years ago. And meant it, every word.”

      “How did you come to know Béranger?”

      “I’m French born.”

      “ ‘In a garret how good is life at twenty,’ ” she translated freely. “I wouldn’t have thought”—she turned her softly brilliant regard upon him—“that life had been so good to you.”

      “It has,” was the rejoinder. “But never so good as now.”

      “I’ve often wondered—you seem to know so many things—where you got your education?”

      “Here and there and everywhere. It’s only a patchwork sort of thing.” (Ungrateful young scoundrel, so to describe my two-hours-a-day of brain-hammering, and the free run of my library.)

      “You’re a very puzzling person,” said she And when a woman says that to a man, deep has begun to call to deep. (The Bonnie Lassie, who knows everything, is my authority for the statement.)

      To her went the patroness of Art, on leaving Julien’s “grenier” that day.

      “Cecily,” she said, in the most casual manner she could contrive, “who is Julien Tenney?”

      “Nobody.”

      “You know what I mean,” pleaded the girl. “What is he?”

      “A brand snatched from the pot-boiling,” returned the Bonnie Lassie, quite pleased with her next turn, which was more than her companion was.

      “Please don’t be clever. Be nice and tell me—”

      “ ‘Be nice, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,’ ” declaimed the Bonnie Lassie, who was feeling perverse that day. “You want me to define his social status for you and tell you whether you’d better invite him to dinner. You’d better not. He might swallow his knife.”

      “You know he wouldn’t!” denied the girl in resentful tones. “I’ve never known any one with more instinctive good manners. He seems to go right naturally.”

      “All due to my influence and training,” bragged the Bonnie Lassie. “I helped bring him up.”

      “Then you must know something of his antecedents.”

      “Ask the Dominie. He says that Julien crawled out of a gutter with the manners of a preux chevalier. Anyway, he never swallowed any of my knives. Though he’s had plenty of opportunity.”

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