From a Bench in Our Square | Page 5

clever," she was pleased to say. "Would you care to sell it?"
"I don't think it would be exactly--" A stern glance from the Bonnie
Lassie cut short the refusal. He swallowed the rest of the sentence.
"Would ten dollars be too little?" asked the visitor with bright
beneficence.
"Too much," he murmured. (The Bonnie Lassie says that with a little
crayoning and retouching he could have sold it for at least fifty times
that.)
The patroness delicately dropped a bill on the table.
"Could you some day find time to let me try you in oils?" he asked.
"Does that take long?" she said doubtfully. "I'm very busy."
"You really should try it, Bobbie," put in the crafty Bonnie Lassie. "It
might give him the start he needs."
What arguments she added later is a secret between the two women, 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."