,
flowing ties, flowing locks, and astonishing hats, sculptors, makers
of exquisite bits of craftsmanship, models, masters, singers of
sorts, actors and actresses, sewing-girls, frightful old concierges;
students from the four corners of the earth driven hither by the
four winds of heaven, came and went in the devil-may-care wake of
Stocks and the Checkleighs and disported themselves before the
reflective and appreciative eyes of Peter Champneys. These gay
Bohemians laughed at him for what Stocks called his spinterishness,
but ended by loving him as only youth can love a comrade.

In six months he knew the Quartier to the core. He met men who were
utter blackguards, whose selfish, cold-blooded brutality filled him
with loathing; he met women with the soul of the cat. But the
Quartier as a whole was sound-hearted; Peter himself was too
sound-hearted not to know. He met Youth at work, his own kind of
work. They were all going to do something great presently,--and
presently many of them did. The very air he breathed stimulated him.
Here were comrades, to whom, as to himself, art was the one
supremely important thing in the universe. They, too, were climbers
toward the purple heights.

Shy young men who work like mules are as thick as hops in any art
center; but shy young men who are immensely talented, who have a
genius for steady labor, and who at the same time have not only the
inclination but the opportunity to be generous, are not numerous
anywhere.

Peter Champneys never talked about himself, made no parade, was so
simple in his tastes that he spent very little upon himself, and
while he could say "No" to impudence, he had ever a quick, warm
"Yes" for need. That he should be able to become an artist had been
the top of his dream; that by a very little self-denial he could
help others to remain artists, left him large-eyed at his own good
fortune. He experienced the glowing happiness that only the generous
can know.

On Sundays he went to see Emma Campbell, for whom he had found a
little house on the summit of Montmartre, on the very top of the
Butte. It had a hillside garden, with a dove-cote in it, and a
little kiosk in which Emma liked to sit, with the cat Satan on her
lap, and projeck at the strange world in which she found herself.
She shared the house with a scene-painter and his wife, and as the
scene-painter was an Englishman, Emma could talk to somebody and be
understood. Emma's idea of happiness was le