only to try her pen, though he made use of no such
commonplace as that. He said it, too, at the end of half
an hour's talk with her, only half an hour. Elfrida,
when she wished to be exact with her vanity, told herself
that it could not have been more than twenty-five minutes.
She wished for particular reasons to be exact with it
now, and she did not fail to give proper weight to the
fact that Frank Parke had never seen her before that day.
The Paris correspondent of the _Daily Dial_ was well
enough known to be of the _monde_, and rich enough to be
as bourgeois as anybody. Therefore some of the people
who knew him thought it odd that at his age this gentleman
should prefer the indelicacies of the Quartier to those
of "tout Paris," and the bad vermouth and cheap cigars
of the Rue Luxembourg to the peculiarly excellent quality
of champagne with which the president's wife made her
social atonement to the Faubourg St. Germain. But it was
so, and its being so rendered Frank Parke's opinion that
Miss Bell could write if she chose to try, not only
supremely valuable to her, but available for the second
time if necessary, which was perhaps more important.

There would be a little more money from Sparta, perhaps
one hundred and fifty dollars. It would come in a week,
and after that there would be none. But a supply of it,
however modest, must be arranged somehow--there were the
"frais" of the atelier, to speak of nothing else. The
necessity was irritatingly absolute. Elfrida wished that
her scruples were not so acute about arranging it by
writing for the press. "If I could think for a moment
that I had any right to it as a means of expression!"
she reflected. "But I haven't. It is an art for others.
And it _is_ an art, as sacred as mine. I have no business
to degrade it to my uses." Her mental position when she
went to see Frank Parke was a cynical compromise with
her artistic conscience, of which she nevertheless
sincerely regretted the necessity.

The correspondent of the _Daily Dial_ had a club for one
side of the river and a cafe for the other. He dined
oftenest at the cafe, and Elfrida's card, with "urgent"
inscribed in pencil on it, was brought to him that evening
as he was finishing his coffee. She had no difficulty
in getting it taken in. Mr. Parke's theory was that a
newspaper man gained more than he lost by accessibility.
He came out immediately, furtively returning a toothpick
to his waistcoat pocket--a bald