They kept to the Montparnasse quarter, for there, Paula said, were the best ateliers for Betty. They found a little restaurant, where only art students ate, and where one could breakfast royally for about a shilling. Betty looked with interest at the faces of the students, and wondered whether she should ever know any of them. Some of them looked interesting. A few were English, and fully half American.
Then the weary hunt for rooms began again.
It was five o'clock before a concierge, unexpected amiable in face of their refusal of her rooms, asked whether they had tried Madame Bianchi's—Madame Bianchi where the atelier was, and the students' meetings on Sunday evenings,—Number 57 Boulevard Montparnasse.
They tried it. One passes through an archway into a yard where the machinery, of a great laundry pulses half the week, up some wide wooden stairs—shallow, easy stairs—and on the first floor are the two rooms. Betty drew a long breath when she saw them. They were lofty, they were airy, they were light. There was not much furniture, but what there was was good—old carved armoires, solid divans and—joy of joys—in each room a carved oak, Seventeenth Century mantelpiece eight feet high and four feet deep.
"I must have these rooms!" Betty whispered. "Oh, I could make them so pretty!"
The rent of the rooms was almost twice as much as the sum they fixed on, and Paula murmured caution.
"Its no use," said Betty. "We'll live on bread and water if you like, but we'll live on it here."
And she took the rooms.
"I'm sure we've done right," she said as they drove off to fetch her boxes: "the rooms will be like a home, you see if they aren't. And there's a piano too. And Madame Bianchi, isn't she a darling; Isn't she pretty and sweet and nice?"
"Yes," said Paula thoughtfully; "it certainly is something that you've got rooms in the house of a woman like that."