They were a gay, good-natured lot, and made a point of regarding life as airily as possible, and taking each day as it came with fantastic good cheer. The house--which stood in one of the shabbiest corners of the Latin Quarter--was full of them from floor to garret--artists, students, models, French, English, Americans, living all of them merrily, by no means the most regular of lives. But there were good friends among them; their world was their own, and they found plenty of sympathy in their loves and quarrels, their luck and ill-luck. Upon the whole there was more ill-luck than luck. Lucky men did not choose for their head-quarters such places as this rather dilapidated building,--they could afford to go elsewhere, to places where the Quarter was better, where the stairs were less rickety, the passages less dark, and the _concierge_ not given to chronic intoxication. Here came the unlucky ones, whose ill-luck was of various orders and degrees: the young ones who were some day to paint pictures which would be seen in the Palais de l'Industrie and would be greeted with acclamations by an appreciative public; the older ones who had painted pictures which had been seen at the Palais de l'Industrie and had not been appreciated at all; the poets whose sonnets were of too subtle an order to reach the common herd; the students who had lived beyond the means allowed them by their highly respectable families, and who were consequently somewhat off color in the eyes of the respectable families in question--these and others of the same class, all more or less poor, more or less out at elbows, and more or less in debt. And yet, as I have said, they lived gayly. They painted, and admired or criticised each other's pictures; they lent and borrowed with equal freedom; they bemoaned their wrongs loudly, and sang and laughed more loudly still as the mood seized them; and any special ill-fortune befalling one of their number generally aroused a display of sympathy which, though it might not last long, was always a source of consolation to the luckless one. But the American, notwithstanding he had been in the house for months, had never become one of them. He had been seen in the early spring going up the stairway to his room, which was a mere garret on the sixth story, and it had been expected among them that in a day or so he would present himself for inspection. But this he did not do, and when he encountered any of their number in his out-goings or in-comings he returned their greetings gently in imperfect French. He spoke slowly and with difficulty, but there was no coldness in his voice or manners, and yet none got much further than the greeting.