They let it drop there. As for the effect upon the girl of Julien Tenny's brilliant and unsettling personality, I could judge only as I saw them occasionally together, she lustrous and exotic as a budding orchid, he in the non-descript motley of his studio garb, serenely unconscious of any incongruity. "Do you think," I asked the Bonnie Lassie, who was sharing my bench one afternoon as Julien was taking the patroness of Art over to where her car waited, "that she is doing him as much good as she thinks she is, or ought to?" "Malice ill becomes one of your age, Dominie," said the Bonnie Lassie with dignity. "I'm quite serious," I protested. "And very unjust. Bobbie is an adorable little person, when you know her." "Does Julien know her well enough to have discovered a self-evident fact?" "Only," pursued my companion, ignoring the question, "she is bored and a little spoiled." "So she comes down here to escape being bored and to get more spoiled." "Julien won't spoil her." "He certainly doesn't appear to bore her." "She's having the tables turned on her without knowing it. Julien is doing her a lot of good. Already she's far less beneficent and bountiful and all that sort of stuff." "Lassie," said I, "what, if I may so express myself, is the big idea?" "Slang is an execrable thing from a professed scholar," she reproved. "However, the big idea is that Julien is really painting. And it's _mine_, that big idea." "Mightn't it be accompanied by a little idea to the effect that the experience is likely to cost him pretty dear? What will be left when Bobbie Holland goes?" "Pooh! Don't be an oracular sphinx," was all that I got for my pains. Nor did Miss Bobbie show any immediate symptoms of going. If the painting seemed at times in danger of stagnation, the same could not be said of the fellowship between painter and paintee. That nourished along, and one day a vagrant wind brought in the dangerous element of historical personalities. The wind, entering at the end of a session, displaced a hanging above the studio door, revealing in bold script upon the plastering Béranger's famous line: "Dans un grenier qu'on est bien á vingt ans!" "Did you write that there?" asked the girl. "Seven long years ago. And meant it, every word." "How did you come to know Béranger?" "I'm French born." "'In a garret how good is life at twenty,'" she translated freely. "I wouldn't have thought"--she turned her softly brilliant regard upon him--"that life had been so good to you." "It has," was the rejoinder. "But never so good as now." "I've often wondered--you seem to know so many things--where you got your education?" "Here and there and everywhere. It's only a patchwork sort of thing." (Ungrateful young scoundrel, so to describe my two-hours-a-day of brain-hammering, and the free run of my library.)