cigarette-smoke in my bed-room! Oh, her face! I had to sneak away,
behind the shrubbery at the end of the garden, for stealthy whiffs.
And it was impossible to get French tobacco. At last I took the bull
by the horns, and fled. It will have been a terrible shock for them.
But better one good blow than endless little ones; better a lump-sum
than instalments with interest.'

But what was she going to do? How was she going to live? For, after
all, much as she loved Paris, she couldn't subsist on its air and
sunshine.

'Oh, never fear! I'll manage somehow. I'll not die of hunger,' she
said confidently.


IX.

And, sure enough, she managed very well. She gave music lessons to the
children of the Quarter, and English lessons to clerks and shop girls;
she did a little translating; she would pose now and then for a
painter friend--she was the original, for instance, of Norton's 'Woman
Dancing,' which you know. She even--thanks to the employment by Chalks
of what he called his 'in_floo_ence'--she even contributed a weekly
column of Paris gossip to the _Palladium_, a newspaper published at
Battle Creek, Michigan, U.S.A., Chalks's native town. 'Put in lots
about me, and talk as if there were only two important centres of
civilisation on earth, Battle Crick and Parus, and it'll be a boom,'
Chalks said. We used to have great fun, concocting those columns of
Paris gossip. Nina, indeed, held the pen and cast a deciding vote; but
we all collaborated. And we put in lots about Chalks--perhaps rather