t ateliers, who were by way
of being painters; and to a shock-headed young man from California,
a sculptor, named Stocks. The Englishmen were closely related to a
large-toothed, very important Lady Somethingorother, high up in the
diplomatic sphere, and the Californian possessed a truly formidable
aunt. Hence the three young men appeared in fashionable circles at
decent intervals. Later, Peter learned to know their redoubtable
relatives as "Rabbits" and "The Grampus," and he once saw a
terrifyingly truthful portrait of "Rabbits" sketched on a skittish
model's bare back, and a movingly realistic little figure of "The
Grampus" modeled by her dutiful nephew in a moment of diabolical
inspiration. It was explained to him that God, for some inscrutable
purpose of his own, generally pleases himself by bestowing only the
most limited human intelligence upon the wealthy relatives of poor
but gifted artists; but that if properly approached, and at not too
frequent intervals, they may be induced to loosen their tight
purse-strings. Wherefore one must somehow manage to keep on good
terms with them. Witness, Stocks said, his forgiving--nay,
kindly--attitude toward The Grampus; see how he went to her house
and drank her loathly tea and ate her beastly little cakes, even
though she regarded a promising sculptor as a sort of unpromising
stone-cutter who couldn't hold down a steady job, and had
vehemently urged him to go in for building and contracting in
Sacramento, California. "And yet that woman has got about all the
money there is in our family!" finished Stocks, bitterly.

"Rabbits takes you aside and talks to you heart to heart," said the
younger Checkleigh, gloomily. The elder Checkleigh's face took on a
look of martyrdom.

"We have Immortal Souls," said he, in a tone of anguish and
affliction. "I ask you, as man to man: Is it our fault?"

It was these three Indians, then, who took Peter Champneys under
their wing, helped him find the pleasantest rooms in the Quartier,
helped him furnish them at about a third of what he would have paid
if left to his own devices, and also helped him to shed his skin of
a timid provincial by plunging him to the scalp in that bubbling
cauldron in which seethes the creative brain of France. Serious and
sad young men who were going to be poets; intense fellows who were
going to rehabilitate the Drama, or write the Greatest Novel;
illustrators, journalists, critics, painters, types in velvet coats