umns of the London
_World_.

"De Pommitz isn't in it this time," he said. "I'll tell
you what I _might_ do, Miss Elfrida. How long have you
got for this--experiment?"

"Less than a week."

"Well, go home and write me an article--something locally
descriptive. Make it as bright as you can, and take a
familiar subject. Let me have it in three days, and I'll
see if I can get it into _Raffini_ for you. Of course,
you know, I can't promise that they'll look at it."

"You are very good," Elfrida returned hastily, seeing
his real anxiety to be off. "Something locally descriptive.
I've often thought the atelier would make a good subject."

"Capital, capital! Only be very careful about personalities
and so forth. _Raffini_ hates giving offence. Good-bye!
Here you, _cocher!_ Boulevard Haussmann!"

CHAPTER V.

John Kendal had only one theory that was not received
with respect by the men at Lucien's. They quoted it as
often as other things he said, but always in a spirit of
derision, while Kendal's ideas as a rule got themselves
discussed seriously, now and then furiously. This young
man had been working in the atelier for three years with
marked success almost from the beginning. The first things
he did had a character and an importance that brought
Lucien himself to admit a degree of soundness in the
young fellow's earlier training, which was equal to great
praise. Since then he had found the line in the most
interesting room in the Palais d'Industrie, the _cours_
had twice medalled him, and Albert Wolff was beginning
to talk about his _coloration delicieuse_. Also it was
known that he had condescended for none of these things.
His success in Paris added piquancy to his preposterous
notion that an Englishman should go home and paint England
and hang his work in the Academy, and made it even more
unreasonable than if he had failed.

"For me," remarked Andre Vambery, with a finely curled
lip, "I never see an English landscape without thinking
of what it would bring _par hectare_. It is _trop
arrangee_, that country, all laid out in a pattern of
hedges and clumps, for the pleasure of the milords. And
every milord has the taste of every other milord. He will
go home to perpetuate that!"

"_Si, si! Mais c'est pour sa patrie._"

Nadie defended him. Women always did.

"Bah!" returned her lover. "_Pour nous autres artists la
France est la patrie, et la France seule!_ Every day he
is in England he will lose--lo