I reckon
your majesty is FRANCE!"

She retained this childish fearlessness as the poor student of the
Conservatoire; went alone all over Paris with her maiden skirts
untarnished by the gilded dust of the boulevards or the filth of
by-ways; knew all the best shops for her friends, and the cheapest for
her own scant purchases; discovered breakfasts for a few sous with pale
sempstresses, whose sadness she understood, and reckless chorus girls,
whose gayety she didn't; she knew where the earliest chestnut buds were
to be found in the Bois, when the slopes of the Buttes Chaumont were
green, and which was the old woman who sold the cheapest flowers before
the Madeleine. Alone and independent, she earned the affection of
Madame Bibelot, the concierge, and, what was more, her confidence. Her
outgoings and incomings were never questioned. The little American could
take care of herself. Ah, if her son Jacques were only as reasonable!
Miss Maynard might have made more friends had she cared; she might have
joined hands with the innocent and light-hearted poverty of the coterie
of her own artistic compatriots, but something in her blood made her
distrust Bohemianism; her poverty was something to her too sacred for
jest or companionship; her own artistic aim was too long and earnest
for mere temporary enthusiasms. She might have found friends in her own
profession. Her professor opened the sacred doors of his family circle
to the young American girl. She appreciated the delicacy, refinement,
and cheerful equal responsibilities of that household, so widely
different from the accepted Anglo-Saxon belief, but there were certain
restrictions that rightly or wrongly galled her American habits of
girlish freedom, and she resolutely tripped past the first etage four or
five flights higher to her attic, the free sky, and independence! Here
she sometimes met another kind of independence in Monsieur Alphonse,
aged twenty two, and she who ought to have been Madame Alphonse, aged
seventeen, and they often exchanged greetings on the landing with great
respect towards each other, and, oddly enough, no confusion or distrait.
Later they even borrowed each other's matches without fear and without
reproach, until one day Monsieur Alphonse's parents took him away,
and the desolated soi-disant Madame Alphonse, in a cheerful burst of
confidence, gave Helen her private opinion of monsieur, and from her
seventeen years' experience warned the American infan