“Perhaps she won’t,” retorted the youth explosively.

“Oh, it will be done tactfully; never fear.  I’ll bring her around to see you and you’ll have to work the sittings yourself.”

As a setting for the abode of a struggling beginner, Julien’s attic needed no change.  It was a whim of his to keep it bare and simple.  He worked out his pictorial schemes of elegance best in an environment where there was nothing to distract the eye.  One could see that Miss Roberta Holland, upon her initial visit, approved its stark and cleanly poverty. (Yes, I was there to see; the Bonnie Lassie had taken me along to make up that first party.) Having done the honors, Julien dropped into the background, and presently was curled up over a drawing-board, sketching eagerly while the Bonnie Lassie and I held the doer of good deeds in talk.  Now the shrewd and able tribe of advertising managers do not pay to any but a master-draughtsman the prices which “J.T.”—­with an arrow transfixing the initials—­gets; and Julien was as deft and rapid as he was skillful.  Soon appreciating what was in progress, the visitor graciously sat quite still.  At the conclusion she held out her hand for the cardboard.

To be a patroness of Art does not necessarily imply that one is an adequate critic.  Miss Holland contemplated what was a veritable little gem in black-and-white with cool approbation.

“Quite clever,” she was pleased to say.  “Would you care to sell it?”

“I don’t think it would be exactly—­” A stern glance from the Bonnie Lassie cut short the refusal.  He swallowed the rest of the sentence.

“Would ten dollars be too little?” asked the visitor with bright beneficence.

“Too much,” he murmured. (The Bonnie Lassie says that with a little crayoning and retouching he could have sold it for at least fifty times that.)

The patroness delicately dropped a bill on the table.

“Could you some day find time to let me try you in oils?” he asked.

“Does that take long?” she said doubtfully.  “I’m very busy.”

“You really should try it, Bobbie,” put in the crafty Bonnie Lassie.  “It might give him the start he needs.”

What arguments she added later is a secret between the two women, but she had her way.  The Bonnie Lassie always does.  So the bare studio was from time to time irradiated with Bobbie Holland’s youthful loveliness and laughter.  For there was much laughter between those two.  Shrewdly foreseeing that this bird of paradise would return to the bare cage only if it were made amusing for her, Julien exerted himself to the utmost to keep her mind at play, and, as I can vouch who helped train him, there are few men of his age who can be as absorbing a companion as Julien when he chooses to exert his charm.  All the time, he was working with a passionate intensity on the portrait; letting everything else go; tossing aside the most remunerative offers; leaving his mail