From a Bench in Our Square | Page 6

"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."
"Lassie," 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 Béranger's famous line:
"Dans un grenier qu'on est bien á 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 Béranger?"
"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.
"Please don't be clever. Be nice and tell me--"
"'Be nice, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,'" declaimed the
Bonnie Lassie, 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 Lassie. "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 Lassie.
And continued sculpting.
III
As Julien had prophesied, it was only a question of time when he would
be surprised by his patroness in his true garb and estate. The event
occurred as he was stepping from his touring-car to get his golf-clubs
from the hallway of his Gramercy Park apartment at the very moment
when Bobbie Holland emerged from the house next door. Both her
hands flew involuntarily to her cheeks, as she took in and wholly
misinterpreted his costume, which is not to be wondered at when one
considers the similarity of a golfing outfit to a chauffeur's livery.
"Oh!" she cried out, as if something had hurt her.
Julien, for once startled out of his accustomed poise, uncovered and
looked at her apprehensively.
Her voice quivered a little as she asked, very low, "Do you have to do
that?"
"Why--er--no," began the puzzled Julien, who failed for the moment to

perceive what of tragic portent inhered in a prospective afternoon of
golf. Her next words enlightened him.
"I should think you might have let me