out him a personal odor which was neither that
of sanctity nor any other abstraction. It took time and
conversation and some acquaintance with values as they
obtain at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the knowledge of
what it meant to be "selling," to lift Monsieur Vambery
to his proper place in her regard. After that she blushed
that he had ever held any other. But from the first
Elfrida had been conscious of a kind of pride in her
unshrinking acceptance of the situation. She and Nadie
had exchanged a pledge of some sort, when Mademoiselle
Palicsky bethought herself of the unconfessed fact. She
gave Elfrida a narrow look, and then leaned back in her
low chair and bent an imperturbable gaze upon the slender
spiral of blue smoke that rose from the end of her
cigarette.

"It is necessary now that you should know, petite--nobody
else does, Lucien would be sure to make a fuss, but--I
have a lover, and we have decided about marriage that it
is ridiculous. It is a _brave ame_. You ought to know
him; but if it makes any difference--"

Elfrida reflected afterward with satisfaction that she
had not even changed color, though she had found the
communication electric. It seemed to her that there had
been something dignified, noble almost, in the answer
she had made, with a smile that acknowledged the fact
that the world had scruples on such accounts as these:

"_Cela m'est absolument egal!_"

So far as the life went it was perfect. The Quartier
spoke and her soul answered it, and the world had nothing
to compare with a conversation like that. But the question
of production, of achievement, was beginning to bring
her moments when she had a terrible sensation that the
temperature of her passion was chilled. She had not yet
seen despair, but she had now and then lost her hold of
herself, and she had made acquaintance with fear. There
had been no vivid realization of failure, but a problem
was beginning to form in her mind, and with it a distinct
terror of the solution, which sometimes found a shape in
her dreams. In waking, voluntary moments she would see
her problem only as an unanswerable enigma.

Yet in the beginning she had felt a splendid confidence.
Her appropriation of theory had been so brilliant and so
rapid, her instructive appreciation had helped itself
out so well with the casual formulas of the schools, she
seemed to herself to have an absolute understanding of
expression. She held her social place among the ot