The model behaved very well in her unusual pose, but the babe--that was the rub. The model did not happen to possess one, and Bishop had not yet learned the difficulties attending the procuring and posing of infants. In the first place, he found scores of babes, but not a mother, however poor, willing to permit her babe to be used as a model, and a model for so gruesome a situation. But after he had almost begun to despair, and had well advanced with his woman model, an Italian woman came one day and informed him that she could get an infant from a friend of her sister's, if he would pay her one franc a day for the use of it. Bishop eagerly made the bargain. Then a new series of troubles began. The babe objected most emphatically to the arrangement. It refused to nestle in the arms of a strange woman about to plunge into eternity, and the strange woman had no knack at all in soothing the infant's outraged feelings. Besides, the model was unable to meet the youngster's frequent demands for what it was accustomed to have, and the mother, who was engaged elsewhere, had to be drummed up at exasperatingly frequent intervals. All this told upon both Bishop and Francinette, the model, and they took turns in swearing at the unruly brat, Bishop in English and Francinette in French. Neither knew how to swear in Italian, or things might have been different. I happened in upon these scenes once in a while, and my enjoyment so exasperated Bishop that he threw paint- tubes, bottles, and everything else at me that he could reach, and once or twice locked me out of the studio, compelling me to kick my shins in the cold street for hours at a time. On such occasions I would stand in the court looking up at our window, expecting momentarily that the babe would come flying down from that direction. When Bishop was not sketching and painting he was working up his inspiration; and that was worst of all. His great effort was to get himself into a suicidal mood. He would sit for hours on the floor, his face between his knees, imagining all sorts of wrongs and slights that the heartless world had put upon him. His husband had beaten him and gone off with another woman; he had tried with all his woman-heart to bear the cross; hunger came to pinch and torture him; he sought work, failed to find it; sought charity, failed to find that; his babe clutched at his empty breasts and cried piteously for food; his heart broken, all hope gone, even God forgetting him, he thought of the dark, silent river, the great cold river, that has brought everlasting peace to countless thousands of suffering young mothers like him; he went to the river; he looked back upon the faint glow of the city's lights in the distance; he cast his glance up to the grim towers of Notre-Dame, standing cold and pitiless against the blacker sky; he looked down upon the black Seine, the great writhing python, so willing to swallow him up; he clutched his babe to his breast, gasped a prayer....