"Rabbits takes you aside and talks to you heart to heart," said the younger Checkleigh, gloomily. The elder Checkleigh's face took on a look of martyrdom. "We have Immortal Souls," said he, in a tone of anguish and affliction. "I ask you, as man to man: Is it our fault?" It was these three Indians, then, who took Peter Champneys under their wing, helped him find the pleasantest rooms in the Quartier, helped him furnish them at about a third of what he would have paid if left to his own devices, and also helped him to shed his skin of a timid provincial by plunging him to the scalp in that bubbling cauldron in which seethes the creative brain of France. Serious and sad young men who were going to be poets; intense fellows who were going to rehabilitate the Drama, or write the Greatest Novel; illustrators, journalists, critics, painters, types in velvet coats, flowing ties, flowing locks, and astonishing hats, sculptors, makers of exquisite bits of craftsmanship, models, masters, singers of sorts, actors and actresses, sewing-girls, frightful old concièrges; students from the four corners of the earth driven hither by the four winds of heaven, came and went in the devil-may-care wake of Stocks and the Checkleighs and disported themselves before the reflective and appreciative eyes of Peter Champneys. These gay Bohemians laughed at him for what Stocks called his spinterishness, but ended by loving him as only youth can love a comrade. In six months he knew the Quartier to the core. He met men who were utter blackguards, whose selfish, cold-blooded brutality filled him with loathing; he met women with the soul of the cat. But the Quartier as a whole was sound-hearted; Peter himself was too sound-hearted not to know. He met Youth at work, his own kind of work. They were all going to do something great presently,--and presently many of them did. The very air he breathed stimulated him. Here were comrades, to whom, as to himself, art was the one supremely important thing in the universe. They, too, were climbers toward the purple heights. Shy young men who work like mules are as thick as hops in any art center; but shy young men who are immensely talented, who have a genius for steady labor, and who at the same time have not only the inclination but the opportunity to be generous, are not numerous anywhere. Peter Champneys never talked about himself, made no parade, was so simple in his tastes that he spent very little upon himself, and while he could say "No" to impudence, he had ever a quick, warm "Yes" for need. That he should be able to become an artist had been the top of his dream; that by a very little self-denial he could help others to remain artists, left him large-eyed at his own good fortune. He experienced the glowing happiness that only the generous can know.