generous, her drawing so bad. The other pupils declared
that she had a head _divinement tragique_, and for those
of them she liked she sometimes posed, filling impressive
parts in their weekly compositions. They all knew the
little appartement in the Rue Porte Royale, more or less
well according to the favor with which they were received.
Nadie Palicsky perhaps knew it best--Nadie Palicsky and
her friend Monsieur Andre Vambery, who always accompanied
her when, she came to Elfrida's in the evening, finding
it impossible to allow her to be out alone at night,
which Nadie confessed agreeable to her vanity, but a bore.

Elfrida found it difficult in the beginning to admire
the friend. He was too small for dignity, and Nadie's
inspired comparison of his long black hair to "_serpents
noirs_" left her unimpressed. Moreover she thought she
detected about him a personal odor which was neither that
of sanctity nor any other abstraction. It took time and
conversation and some acquaintance with values as they
obtain at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the knowledge of
what it meant to be "selling," to lift Monsieur Vambery
to his proper place in her regard. After that she blushed
that he had ever held any other. But from the first
Elfrida had been conscious of a kind of pride in her
unshrinking acceptance of the situation. She and Nadie
had exchanged a pledge of some sort, when Mademoiselle
Palicsky bethought herself of the unconfessed fact. She
gave Elfrida a narrow look, and then leaned back in her
low chair and bent an imperturbable gaze upon the slender
spiral of blue smoke that rose from the end of her