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 Lassie, 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?"
"Nobody."
"You know what I mean," pleaded the girl. "_What_ is he?"
"A brand snatched from the pot-boiling," returned the Bonnie Lassie,
quite pleased with her next turn, which was more than her companion was.
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