ulogne, and has scorched half the way back
to meet her "officier" in pale blue. The two are deep in conversation.
Farther on are four older men, accompanied by a pale, sweet-faced woman
of thirty, her blue-black hair brought in a bandeau over her dainty
ears. She is the model of the gray-haired man on the left, a man of
perhaps fifty, with kindly intelligent eyes and strong, nervous,
expressive hands--hands that know how to model a colossal Greek
war-horse, plunging in battle, or create a nymph scarcely a foot high
out of a lump of clay, so charmingly that the French Government has not
only bought the nymph, but given him a little red ribbon for his pains.

[Illustration: (omnibus)]

He is telling the others of a spot he knows in Normandy, where one can
paint--full of quaint farm-houses, with thatched roofs; picturesque
roadsides, rich in foliage; bright waving fields, and cool green
woods, and purling streams; quaint gardens, choked with lavender and
roses and hollyhocks--and all this fair land running to the white sand
of the beach, with the blue sea beyond. He will write to old Pere
Jaqueline that they are all coming--it is just the place in which to
pose a model "en plein air,"--and Suzanne, his model, being a Normande
herself, grows enthusiastic at the thought of going down again to the
sea. Long before she became a Parisienne, and when her beautiful hair
was a tangled shock of curls, she used to go out in the big boats,
with the fisherwomen--barefooted, brown, and happy. She tells them of
those good days, and then they all go into the Taverne to dine, filled
with the idea of the new trip, and dreaming of dinners under the
trees, of "Tripes a la mode de Caen," Normandy cider, and a lot of new
sketches besides.

[Illustration: (shop front)]

Already the tables within are well filled. The long room, with its newer
annex, is as brilliant as a jewel box--the walls rich in tiled panels
suggesting the life of the Quarter, the woodwork in gold and light oak,
the big panels of the rich gold ceiling exquisitely painted.

At one of the tables two very chic young women are dining with a young
Frenchman, his hair and dress in close imitation of the Duc d'Orleans.
These poses in dress are not uncommon.

A strikingly pretty woman, in a scarlet-spangled gown as red as her
lips, is dining with a well-built, soldierly-looking man in black; they
sit side by side as is the custom here.

The woman reminds one of a red lizard--