all we have to do is just to push the bell and the door opens. Now
Audrey, dear."

Audrey did not stir.

"_Mon Dieu!_" murmured Madame Piriac, "What has she, little one?"

Rosamund said stiffly and curtly:

"She is asleep.... It is very late. Four o'clock."

Excellent as was Audrey's excuse for her lapse, Rosamund was not at all
pleased. That slumber was one of Rosamund's rare defeats.

CHAPTER XII

WIDOWHOOD IN THE STUDIO

Audrey was in a white pique coat and short skirt, with pale blue blouse and
pale blue hat--and at the extremity blue stockings and white tennis shoes.
She picked up a tennis racket in its press, and prepared to leave the
studio. She had bought the coat, the skirt, the blouse, the hat, the
tennis shoes, the racket, the press, and practically all she wore, visible
and invisible, at that very convenient and immense shop, the Bon Marche,
whose only drawback was that it was always full. Everybody in the Quarter,
except a few dolls not in earnest, bought everything at the Bon Marche,
because the Bon Marche was so comprehensive and so reliable. If you desired
a toothbrush, the Bon Marche not only supplied it, but delivered it in a
30-h.p. motor-van manned by two officials in uniform. And if you desired a
bedroom suite, a pair of corsets, a box of pastels, an anthracite stove, or
a new wallpaper, the Bon Marche would never shake its head.

And Audrey was now of the Quarter. Many simple sojourners in the Quarter
tried to imply the Latin Quarter when they said the Quarter. But the
Quarter was only the Montparnasse Quarter. Nevertheless, it sufficed. It
had its own boulevards, restaurants, cafes, concerts, theatres, palaces,
shops, gardens, museums, and churches. There was no need to leave it, and
if you were a proper amateur of the Quarter, you never did leave it save to
scoff at other Quarters. Sometimes you fringed the Latin Quarter in the big
cafes of the Boulevard St. Michel, and sometimes you strolled northwards as
far as the Seine, and occasionally even crossed the Seine in order to enter
the Louvre, which lined the other bank, but you did not go any farther. Why
should you?

Audrey had become so acclimatised to the Quarter that Miss Nickall's studio
seemed her natural home. It was very typically a woman's studio of the
Quarter. About thirty feet each way and fourteen feet high, with certain
irregularities of shape, it was divided into corners. There were the two
bed-corners, which were