Her informant had told her that the students were not supposed to inquire about one another at all, the ideal of the atelier being a place where high and low alike could lay aside their disabilities and get the benefits of the common workshop. She added that there had been several personages of importance studying there since she herself had been a student, but that she had always heard of it from the outside, and they had generally left before she had identified them. “I spotted the princess, though,” she had said. “As soon as I heard that there was a Russian princess studying here, I picked her out. Do you know which one she is?” Martha had answered, “The lady in the red blouse”--a guess at once confirmed. “Isn’t she stunning?” her companion had gone on; “I’m dying to speak to her! If she were not a princess, I’d have done it long ago. I can’t go the Russian; but no doubt she speaks every language. Russians always do.” At this point of the conversation the lady herself had come into the cloak-room. A neat French maid who was [Illustration: “A LITTLE AMERICAN CHATTERBOX.”] in waiting had come forward, and held out her lady’s wrap, a magnificent sable thing, in which the beautiful creature had quickly infolded herself, and left the room, the two girls meanwhile making a tremendous effort to cover their breathless interest by an air of unconsciousness. Ever since that day--indeed, even before it--Martha had been a silent worshiper at the shrine of the princess. She had a passionate love of beauty, and her heart, for all her grave and shy exterior, was packed as full of romance as it could hold. The discovery that this beautiful being was a princess--and a Russian princess, of all others--was meet food for this appetite for the romantic; and she dreamed by the hour about this young woman’s life, and wondered what it had been and was to be. She knew she could not be many years older than herself, and she wondered, with burning interest, whether she was or was not married. Sometimes she would hold to one opinion for days, and then something--a mere turn of expression, perhaps--would convert her to the opposite one. She wanted her to be unmarried, so that she might be free to construct from her imagination a beautiful future for her; and yet she dreaded to find out that she was married. There was certainly a look about the princess which contradicted Martha’s ideal of her as the possessor of a fair, unwritten life-page. Martha had watched her hands to see if she wore a wedding-ring; but those extraordinarily beautiful hands were either loaded down with jeweled gauds of antique workmanship or else quite ringless. Still, many married women were careless about wearing their wedding-rings, a thing which Martha herself could not comprehend; but she felt that this wonderful creature was removed as far as possible from her in both actuality and ideas.