From a Bench in Our Square Part 3

"Let her go. Your portrait will be finished meantime, won't it?"

"Oh, yes. That'll be finished."

This time the Bonnie La.s.sie did look up. Immediately she looked back again.

"In any case she'll have to go away some day--won't she?"

"I suppose so," returned he in a gloomy growl.

"I warned you at the outset, 'Dangerous,'" she pointed out.

They let it drop there. As for the effect upon the girl of Julien Tenny's brilliant and unsettling personality, I could judge only as I saw them occasionally together, she l.u.s.trous and exotic as a budding orchid, he in the non-descript motley of his studio garb, serenely unconscious of any incongruity.

"Do you think," I asked the Bonnie La.s.sie, who was sharing my bench one afternoon as Julien was taking the patroness of Art over to where her car waited, "that she is doing him as much good as she thinks she is, or ought to?"

"Malice ill becomes one of your age, Dominie," said the Bonnie La.s.sie with dignity.

"I'm quite serious," I protested.

"And very unjust. Bobbie is an adorable little person, when you know her."

"Does Julien know her well enough to have discovered a self-evident fact?"

"Only," pursued my companion, ignoring the question, "she is bored and a little spoiled."

"So she comes down here to escape being bored and to get more spoiled."

"Julien won't spoil her."

"He certainly doesn't appear to bore her."

"She's having the tables turned on her without knowing it. Julien is doing her a lot of good. Already she's far less beneficent and bountiful and all that sort of stuff."

"La.s.sie," said I, "what, if I may so express myself, is the big idea?"

"Slang is an execrable thing from a professed scholar," she reproved.

"However, the big idea is that Julien is really painting. And it's _mine_, that big idea."

"Mightn't it be accompanied by a little idea to the effect that the experience is likely to cost him pretty dear? What will be left when Bobbie Holland goes?"

"Pooh! Don't be an oracular sphinx," was all that I got for my pains.

Nor did Miss Bobbie show any immediate symptoms of going. If the painting seemed at times in danger of stagnation, the same could not be said of the fellowship between painter and paintee. That nourished along, and one day a vagrant wind brought in the dangerous element of historical personalities. The wind, entering at the end of a session, displaced a hanging above the studio door, revealing in bold script upon the plastering Beranger's famous line:

"Dans un grenier qu'on est bien a vingt ans!"

"Did you write that there?" asked the girl.

"Seven long years ago. And meant it, every word."

"How did you come to know Beranger?"

"I'm French born."

"'In a garret how good is life at twenty,'" she translated freely. "I wouldn't have thought"--she turned her softly brilliant regard upon him--"that life had been so good to you."

"It has," was the rejoinder. "But never so good as now."

"I've often wondered--you seem to know so many things--where you got your education?"

"Here and there and everywhere. It's only a patchwork sort of thing."

(Ungrateful young scoundrel, so to describe my two-hours-a-day of brain-hammering, and the free run of my library.)

"You're a very puzzling person," said she And when a woman says that to a man, deep has begun to call to deep. (The Bonnie La.s.sie, who knows everything, is my authority for the statement.)

To her went the patroness of Art, on leaving Julien's "grenier" that day.

"Cecily," she said, in the most casual manner she could contrive, "who _is_ Julien Tenney?"

"n.o.body."

"You know what I mean," pleaded the girl. "_What_ is he?"

"A brand s.n.a.t.c.hed from the pot-boiling," returned the Bonnie La.s.sie, quite pleased with her next turn, which was more than her companion was.

"Please don't be clever. Be nice and tell me--"

"'Be nice, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,'" declaimed the Bonnie La.s.sie, who was feeling perverse that day. "You want me to define his social status for you and tell you whether you'd better invite him to dinner. You'd better not. He might swallow his knife."

"You know he wouldn't!" denied the girl in resentful tones. "I've never known any one with more instinctive good manners. He seems to go right naturally."

"All due to my influence and training," bragged the Bonnie La.s.sie. "I helped bring him up."

"Then you must know something of his antecedents."

"Ask the Dominie. He says that Julien crawled out of a gutter with the manners of a _preux chevalier_. Anyway, he never swallowed any of _my_ knives. Though he's had plenty of opportunity."

"It's very puzzling," lamented Bobbie.

"Why let it prey like a worm i' the bud of your mind? You're not going to adopt him, perhaps?"

For the moment Bobbie Holland's eyes were dreamy and her tongue unguarded. "I don't know what I'm going to do with him," said she with a gesture as of one who despairingly gives over an insoluble problem.

"Umph!" said the Bonnie La.s.sie.

And continued sculpting.

III