Drawing! by Jove! Color—color is vice. Certainly it can be and has the right to be one of the finest virtues. Grasped with a strong hand, controlled by her master drawing, color is a splendid bride, with a husband worthy of her—her lover, but her master, too, the most magnificent mistress in the world, and the result is to be seen in all the lovely things produced from their union. But coupled with indecision, with a weak, timid, vicious drawing, easily satisfied, color becomes a jade making game of her mate, and abusing him just as she pleases, taking the thing lightly so long as she has a good time, treating her unfortunate companion like a duffer who bores her—which is just what he does. And look at the result! a chaos of intoxication, of trickery, regret, unfinished things. Well, enough of this. It explains the immense amount of work that I am now doing. I have been teaching myself thus for a year or more and I am sure that I shall make up the wasted time. But—what labor and pain! One advantage in not having money in Europe is that it forces one to live with the natives and not mingle with transplanted America, vulgar with luxury, that exists in every large capital. We had a good chance to learn the French nature, bear with its eccentricities, and appreciate its wonderful charm. They never miss a chance to make a witty remark. I remember a girl about twenty-five, but looking sixteen, with bobbed hair (unusual in those days), conspicuously short skirts, and woolen stockings, looking distinctly the poor gentlewoman, walking down the boulevard one day entirely alone. Under her arm was a violin case, looking exactly like a coffin. Each café has its character, and as she passed the Café de Madrid, with its gathering of literary people, a perfectly dressed Frenchman, lavender tie and all, at one of the outer tables rose, raised his hat and said: “_Ah, Mademoiselle! Tu vas enterrer la petite?_” (“You go to bury the little one?”) There was dead silence until she was out of sight, when every man in the café rose and lifted his hat to the speaker. We, in America, are not in consonance with wit and beauty as they are. If you make good in Paris, it is all right. The students once carried a nude model all over the city, and the citizens respectfully bowed to Beauty. Again, conversely, an actress who appeared in a play in the nude was madly applauded—until she made the fatal and inartistic mistake of taking a curtain call. She was hissed off the stage. I remember Rochegrosse, a fellow painter, picking up a red-velvet-and-gold hat of the Louis Onze period, one day in the studio. It made him look exactly like a mediæval page. Without thinking, he wore it out—the whole length of the boulevard. No one thought to laugh, but all stopped and said “Admirable.” You must not be ridiculous in France, but you are not necessarily ridiculous just because you differ from the crowd, as you are in America.