A Daughter of To-Day | Page 9

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 passing 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 passed, 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 passionate, 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 assured 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