“What a friend we have in Champ-neys,
          All his gloves and pa-ants to wear!”

Stocks sang in a voice like the scraping of a mattock over flint; one saw that he had been piously raised.  Then he hooked his arm in Peter’s and the two went forth to join the joyous hordes surging up the Boul’ Miche, and to dine in their favorite restaurant, where the waiters were one’s good friends, and Madame the proprietress addressed her Bohemians as “mes enfants.”  Having dined, one joined one’s brother workers who waged the battle of Art with jaws and gestures.  Bawling out the slang of the studios, they grimaced, sneered, shrugged, praised, demolished.  Nothing was sacred to these young savages but the joy of the present.  They had no past, and the future hadn’t arrived.  They lived in the moment, worked, laughed, loved, and, when they could, dined.  When one had a handful of silver, how gay the world was!  How one wished to pat it on the back and invite it to come and be merry with one!

In the full stream of this turbulent tide, behold Peter Champneys; with a lock of his black hair falling across his forehead; his head cocked sidewise; and his big nose and clear golden eyes giving him the aspect of a benevolent hawk, like, say, Horus, Hawk of the Sun.  Those golden eyes of his saw tolerantly as well as clearly.  This quiet American worked like a fiend, yet had time to look on and laugh with you while you played.  He was gravely gay at his best, but he didn’t neglect the good things of his youth.  And he had a genius for playing impromptu Providence when you were down on your luck and about all in.  Maybe you hadn’t dined for a couple of days, or maybe you were pretty nearly frozen in your room, as you had no fire; and you were wondering whether, after all, you weren’t a fool to starve and freeze for art’s sake, and whether, all things considered, life was worth living; and there’d be a gentle tap at your door, and Peter Champneys would stick his thin dark face in, smilingly.  He’d tell you he’d been lonely all day, and would you, if you hadn’t done so already, kindly come and dine with him?  He spoke French with a South Carolina accent, in those days, but an archangel’s voice could not then have sounded more dulcet in your ears than his.  Presently, over your cigarettes, you found yourself telling him just how things were with you.  Maybe you slept on a lounge in his studio that night, because it was warmer there.  And next morning you could face life and work feeling that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.  That’s what Peter Champneys meant to many a hard-pressed youngster.

With his immense capacity for work, at the end of a year Peter Champneys had made great strides.  But he was troubled.  Like Millet, he couldn’t take the ordered direction.  He felt that he was merely marking time, that he wasn’t on the right track.  His robust and original talent demanded heartier food than was offered it.  Reluctantly enough, Peter withdrew from the official studio to which he was attached, and went on his own.  It was a momentous step.