[Illustration: THE ELDER SWEDE AND ARAMINTA SHODDY.] "Did you earn more money with the music or as model?" asked Mademoiselle Emilie, the girl-artist from Madrid, with black hair dyed golden, who always swore by Murillo's Virgins, and who did her work dreamily, as if the motions of her hands were timed to the languorous rhythm of some far-off, daintily-touched guitar beneath vine-wreathed balcony and starlit sky. "In Londres I gained more money as musician. In Angleterre zere is not mooch love of ze Christ, ze St. John and ze Judas. It is not a Catholic country, comme la France, and ze Anglaises aime bettaire ze gods of ze old Greek hommes. In la France zey aime ze true religion, and I gain mooch money, and am in ze Salon many times evairy year, because I am ze best Christ in Paris." A wail swept up from French, American, English, Swedish, Spanish, Norwegian, Russian and West Indian bosoms. "_We'll_ embrace the religion and the gods of the old Greek hommes then, or throw ourselves into the profoundest gulfs of infidelity, while we remain in Paris," ejaculated Bostonia in a vigorous stage-aside. "Have you a wife?" asked Madame Deschamps, a fashionable portrait-painter. "Oui, madame. Ma femme is Lucreza, whom you _know_. She has made the nymphs and goddesses for a _thousand_ pictures, but now she is so much fat that the messieurs will have her only for the head, although she still poses for the _ensemble_ in the ateliers des dames." Here the best Christ in Paris grinned satanically as a polyglot howl went up from among the students. "That's his tit for the tat of the 'Cheshire cat,'" laughed Madame Lafarge, a French-American Corinne with an all-French moustache. "We won't have Lucreza again if she is too fat to pose for the nude except in a _ladies'_ studio," snapped the elder Swede. "Oh, I have forgotten to say zat she has upset ze pail since eight days," chuckled the man. "Upset the pail?" And twenty pairs of eyes looked full of interrogation-points. "Giggle! giggle! giggle!" came sputteringly from behind Concordia's easel as she gasped, "Don't you understand? He has improved his English among the Americans in Gerome's studio, and he means she kicked the bucket eight days ago." "Quelle langue! quelle _langue est la langue_ Americaine!" sniffed the elder Swede, wiping off a brushful of "turps" in her back hair. Paletta twisted her head so as to peer through the forest of easels at the last speaker. "What daubs _she_ must make!" she thought, gazing at spectacled green eyes and hay-colored hair _a la Chinoise_ with her fixed idea that "an artistic nature always wrought a semblance of its own beauty upon its outward form." "What _was_ the Greek religion?" questioned a girlish voice. Paletta twisted her neck again. "What _lovely_ ideals must blossom upon _her_ _canvases_!" she thought as she saw a fair vision of rose-tints, creamy texture and sculptured lines ensphered in a halo of golden hair.