along, and one day a vagrant wind brought in the dangerous element of
historical personalities. The wind, entering at the end of a session,
displaced a hanging above the studio door, revealing in bold script upon
the plastering Beranger's famous line:

"Dans un grenier qu'on est bien a vingt ans!"

"Did you write that there?" asked the girl.

"Seven long years ago. And meant it, every word."

"How did you come to know Beranger?"

"I'm French born."

"'In a garret how good is life at twenty,'" she translated freely. "I
wouldn't have thought"--she turned her softly brilliant regard upon
him--"that life had been so good to you."

"It has," was the rejoinder. "But never so good as now."

"I've often wondered--you seem to know so many things--where you got
your education?"

"Here and there and everywhere. It's only a patchwork sort of thing."
(Ungrateful young scoundrel, so to describe my two-hours-a-day of
brain-hammering, and the free run of my library.)

"You're a very puzzling person," said she And when a woman says that to
a man, deep has begun to call to deep. (The Bonnie Lassie, who knows
everything, is my authority for the statement.)

To her went the patroness of Art, on leaving Julien's "grenier" that
day.

"Cecily," she said, in the most casual manner she could contrive, "who
_is_ Julien Tenney?"

"Nobody."

"You know what I mean," pleaded the girl. "_What_ is he?"

"A brand snatched from the pot-boiling," returned the Bonnie Lassie,
quite pleased with her next turn, which was more than her companion was.

"Please don't be clever. Be nice and tell me--"

"'Be nice, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,'" declaimed the
Bonnie Lassie, who was feeling perverse that day. "You want me to define
his social status for you and tell you whether you'd better invite him
to dinner. You'd better not. He might swallow his knife."

"You know he wouldn't!" denied the girl in resentful tones. "I've never
known any one with more instinctive good manners. He seems to go right
naturally."

"All due to my influence and training," bragged the Bonnie Lassie. "I
helped bring him up."

"Then you must know something of his antecedents."

"Ask the Dominie. He says that Julien crawled out of a gutter with the
manners of a _preux chevalier_. Anyway, he never swallowed any of _my_
knives. Though he's had plenty of opportunity."

"It's very puzzling," lamented Bobbie.

"Why let it prey like a worm i' the bud of