y. "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 protege form sound artistic tastes. (When the Bonnie
Lassie heard that, she all but choked.) As for Julien!

"This