with some success, at originality instead.  She found it easy in Paris to invest her striking personality in a distinctive costume, sufficiently becoming and sufficiently odd, of which a broad soft felt hat, which made a delightful brigand of her, and a Hungarian cloak formed important features.  The Hungarian cloak suited her so extremely well that artistic considerations compelled her to wear it occasionally, I fear, when other people would have found it uncomfortably warm.  In nothing that she said or did or admired or condemned was there any trace of the commonplace, except, perhaps, the desire to avoid it; it had become her conviction that she owed this to herself.  She was thoroughly popular in the atelier, her petits soupers were so good, her enthusiasms so generous, her drawing so bad.  The other pupils declared that she had a head divinement tragique, and for those of them she liked she sometimes posed, filling impressive parts in their weekly compositions.  They all knew the little appartement in the Rue Porte Royale, more or less well according to the favor with which they were received.  Nadie Palicsky perhaps knew it best—­Nadie Palicsky and her friend Monsieur Andre Vambery, who always accompanied her when, she came to Elfrida’s in the evening, finding it impossible to allow her to be out alone at night, which Nadie confessed agreeable to her vanity, but a bore.

Elfrida found it difficult in the beginning to admire the friend.  He was too small for dignity, and Nadie’s inspired comparison of his long black hair to “serpents noirs” left her unimpressed.  Moreover she thought she detected about him a personal odor which was neither that of sanctity nor any other abstraction.  It took time and conversation and some acquaintance with values as they obtain at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the knowledge of what it meant to be “selling,” to lift Monsieur Vambery to his proper place in her regard.  After that she blushed that he had ever held any other.  But from the first Elfrida had been conscious of a kind of pride in her unshrinking acceptance of the situation.  She and Nadie had exchanged a pledge of some sort, when Mademoiselle Palicsky bethought herself of the unconfessed fact.  She gave Elfrida a narrow look, and then leaned back in her low chair and bent an imperturbable gaze upon the slender spiral of blue smoke that rose from the end of her cigarette.

“It is necessary now that you should know, petite—­nobody else does, Lucien would be sure to make a fuss, but—­I have a lover, and we have decided about marriage that it is ridiculous.  It is a brave ame.  You ought to know him; but if it makes any difference—­”

Elfrida reflected afterward with satisfaction that she had not even changed color, though she had found the communication electric.  It seemed to her that there had been something dignified, noble almost, in the answer she had made, with a smile that acknowledged the fact that the world had scruples on such accounts as these: