“I’m making a start tomorrow at Julien’s.”
“Then pay for your drink when the Massier introduces himself, and if you know a rorty song sing it for all you’re worth.”
After lunch he helped Wynne buy colours, brushes, and a beautiful walnut palette, then wished him luck and departed.
They never met again. Paris is the place of quick friendships and equally quick partings. Races lose their characteristic shyness under the Paris sun. Strangers accost each other and join in day-long or night-long festivities, exchange their most intimate thoughts, and finally go their ways without even so much as asking each other’s names.
IV
Wynne arrived at the Atelier Jean Paul Laurens at a quarter to the hour of eight A. M. He was the first comer, and had a moment’s leisure to survey his surroundings. The studio itself was not large, and as high as the arm could reach the walls were plastered, generations deep, with palette scrapings. Above in great profusion were studies from the nude, heads and charcoal drawings in every possible mood of form and light. To Wynne, hitherto accustomed to regard paintings as pictures, these canvases struck a note of brutal coarseness, offending his æsthetic sensibilities. They seemed no more than men and women stripped of their clothing and indecently exposed.
“God! I won’t paint like that,” he thought.
From a great pile of easels in the corner he selected one and disposed it a few feet away from the model’s throne; which done, he set his palette with an infinite number of small dabs of colour. He thrust a few brushes through the thumb-hole, and was ready to make a start when the time arrived.
Presently a little Italian girl, with heavy gold rings in her ears, and a coloured kerchief over her head, came in and nodded a greeting.
“Nouveau?” she inquired.