ien was scolding the Swede roundly;
she had disappointed him, he said. Elfrida felt heavily
how impossible it was that _she_ should disappoint him.
And they had all heard--the English girl in the South
Kensington gown, the rich New Yorker, Nadie's rival the
Roumanian, Nadie herself; and they were all, except the
last, working more vigorously for hearing. Nadie had
turned her head away, and so far as the back of a neck
and the tips of two ears could express oblivion of what
had passed, it might have been gathered from hers. But
Elfrida knew better, and she resented the pity of the
pretence more than if she had met Mademoiselle Palicsky's
long light gray eyes full of derisive laughter.

For a year she had been in it and of it, that intoxicating
life of the Quartier Latin: so much in it that she had
gladly forgotten any former one; so much of it that it
had become treason to believe existence supportable under
any other conditions. It was her pride that she had felt
everything from the beginning; her instinctive apprehension
of all that is to be apprehended in the passionate,
fantastic, vivid life on the left side of the Seine had
been a conscious joy from the day she had taken her tiny
appartement in the Rue Porte Royale, and bought her colors
and sketching-block from a dwarf-like little dealer in
the next street, who assured her proudly that he supplied
Henner and Dagnan-Bouveret, and moreover knew precisely
what she wanted from experience. "_Moi aussi, mademoiselle,
je suis artist!_" She had learned nothing, she had absorbed
everything. It seemed to her that she had entered into
her inheritance, and that in the possessions that throng
the Quartier Latin she was born to be rich. In thinking
this she had an Overpowering realization of the poverty
of Sparta, so convincing that she found it unnecessary
to tell herself that she would never go back there. That
was the unconscious pivotal supposition in everything
she thought or said or did. After the first bewildering
day or two when the exquisite thrill of Paris captured
her indefinitely, she felt the full tide of her life turn
and flow steadily in a new direction with a delight of
revelation and an ecstasy of promise that made nothing
in its sweep of every emotion that had not its birth and
growth in art, and forbade the mere consideration of
anything that might be an obstacle, as if it were a sin.
She entered her new world with proud recognition of its
unwritten la