three-legged stools, or darted hither and thither. Paris was evidently
beginning to empty its studios; the Normandy beaches now furnished the
better model.

One morning we were in luck. A certain blonde beard had counted early
in the day on having the beach to himself. He had posed his model in
the open daylight, that he might paint her in the sun. He had placed
her, seated on an edge of seawall; for a background there was the curve
of the yellow sands and the flat breadth of the sea, with the droop of
the sky meeting the sea miles away. The girl was a slim, fair shape,
with long, thin legs and delicately moulded arms; she was dressed in
the fillet and chiton of Greece. During her long poses she was as
immovable as an antique marble; her natural grace and prettiness were
transfigured into positive beauty by the flowing lines and the pink
draperies of her Attic costume. Seated thus, she was a breathing
embodiment of the best Greek period. When the rests came, her jump from
the wall landed her square on her feet and at the latter end of the
nineteenth century. Once free, she bounded from her perch on the high
sea-wall. In an instant she had tucked her tinted draperies within the
slender girdle; her sandalled feet must be untrammelled, she was about
to take her run on the beach. Soon she was pelting, irreverently,
her painter with a shower of loose pebbles. Next she had challenged him
to a race; when she reached the goal, her thin, bare arms were uplifted
as she clapped and shouted for glee; the Quartier Latin in her blood
was having its moment of high revelry in the morning sun.

This little grisette, running about free and unshackled in her loose
draperies, quite unabashed in her state of semi-nudity--gay, reckless,
wooing pleasure on the wing, surely she might have posed as the
embodied archetype of France itself. So has this pagan among modern