From a Bench in Our Square | Page 3

tempered steel of the Little Red Doctor's experience. Said the Little Red Doctor (who was pressed for time at the moment): "Take orders. Or get out. Which?"
She straightened like a soldier. "Tell me what you want done."
At the end of the onset, when he gave her her release from volunteer service, she turned shining eyes upon him. "I've never been so treated in my life! You're a bully and a brute."
"You're a brick," retorted the Little Red Doctor. "I'll send for you next time Our Square needs help."
"I'll come," said she, and they shook hands solemnly.
Thereafter Our Square felt a little more lenient toward her ministrations, and even those of us who least approved her activities felt the stir of radiance and color which she brought with her.
On a day when the local philanthropy market was slack, and Miss Holland, seated in the Bonnie Lassie's front window, was maturing some new and benign outrage upon our sensibilities, she called out to the sculptress at work on a group:
"There's a queer man making queer marks on your sidewalk."
"That's Peter Quick Banta. He's a fellow artist."
"And another man, young, with a big, maney head like an amiable lion; quite a beautiful lion. He's making more marks."
"Let him make all he wants."
"They're waving their arms at each other. At least the queer man is. I think they're going to fight."
"They won't. It's only an academic discussion on technique."
"Who is the young one?"
"He's the ruin of what might have been a big artist."
"No! Is he? What did it? Drink?"
"Does he look it?"
The window-gazer peered more intently at the debaters below. "It's a peculiar face. Awfully interesting, though. He's quite poorly dressed. Does he need money? Is that what's wrong?"
"That's it, Bobbie," returned the Bonnie Lassie with a half-smile. "He needs the money."
The rampant philanthropist stirred within Miss Roberta Holland's fatally well-meaning soul. "Would it be a case where I could help? I'd love to put a real artist back on his feet. Are you sure he's real?"
On the subject of Art, the Bonnie Lassie is never anything but sincere and direct, however much she may play her trickeries with lesser interests, such as life and love and human fate.
"No; I'm not. If he were, I doubt whether he'd have let himself go so wrong."
"Perhaps it isn't too late," said the amateur missionary hopefully. "Is he a man to whom one could offer money?"
The Bonnie Lassie's smile broadened without change in its subtle quality. "Julien Tenney isn't exactly a pauper. He just thinks he can't afford to do the kind of thing he wants and ought to."
"What ought he to do?"
"Paint--paint--paint!" said the Bonnie Lassie vehemently. "Five years ago I believe he had the makings of a great painter in him. And now look what he's doing!"
"Making marks on sidewalks, you mean?"
"Worse. Commercial art."
"Designs and that sort of thing?"
"Do you ever look at the unearthly beautiful, graceful and gloriously dressed young super-Americans who appear in the advertisements, riding in super-cars or wearing super-clothes or brushing super-teeth with super-toothbrushes?"
"I suppose so," said the girl vaguely.
"He draws those."
"Is that what you call pot-boiling?"
"One kind."
"And I suppose it pays just a pittance."
"Well," replied the Bonnie Lassie evasively, "he sticks to it, so it must support him."
"Then I'm going to help him."
"'To fulfill his destiny,' is the accepted phrase," said the Bonnie Lassie wickedly. "I'll call him in for you to look over. But you'd best leave the arrangements for a later meeting."
Being summoned, Julien Tenney entered the house as one quite at home despite his smeary garb of the working artist. His presentation to Miss Holland was as brief as it was formal, for she took her departure at once.
"Who is she?" asked Julien, staring after her.
"Bobbie Holland, a gilded butterfly from uptown."
"What's she doing here?"
"Good."
"O Lord!" said he in pained tones. "Has she got a Cause?"
"Naturally."
"Philanthropist?"
"Worse."
"There ain't no sich a animile."
"There is. She's a patron of art."
"Wow!"
"Yes. She's going to patronize you."
"Not if I see her first. How do I qualify as a subject?"
"She considered you a wasted life."
"Where does she get that idea?"
The Bonnie Lassie removed a small, sharp implement from the left eye of a stoical figurine and pointed it at herself.
"Do you think that's fair?" demanded the indignant youth.
The Bonnie Lassie reversed the implement and pointed it at him. "Do you or do you not," she challenged, "invade our humble precincts in a five-thousand-dollar automobile?"
"It's my only extravagance."
"Do you or do you not maintain a luxurious apartment in Gramercy Park, when you are not down here posing in your attic as an honest working-man?"
"Oh, see here, Mrs. Staten, I won't stand for that!" he expostulated. "You know perfectly well I keep my room here because it's the only place I can work in quietly--"
"And because Peter Quick Banta would break his foolish old heart