Alfred S. Gibbs.
AN ATELIER DES DAMES.
After years of patient endeavor, of hope deferred and heart oftentimes made sick, Paletta found herself at last in Paris. Behind her were years of anxious calculations and shabby economies, a chequered pathway of brilliant ambitions and sombre discouragements. Before her was another vista of several years of art-study in the great capital—a vista arched, she could not but know, by as heavy clouds as had ever darkened her path. Yet she felt, even although she could not see its end, that the forward vista climbed ever upward toward glorious heights, upon which the storms of despair never beat, and where she could more nearly touch upon the divine ideals that ever elude the grasp of even the loftiest of earth's climbers.
And thus she was content. Paletta was yet a little young, it must be said, yet in that blessed youthfulness when the loins are girded with the strength that reduces mountains to molehills and forces the Apollyon of dismay to flee from out every dark valley.
Behold Paletta—twenty-three years of age, with a winy color upon her lips, the faintest perceptible shadow of fading upon the roses of her cheeks, a little anxious wrinkle between her earnest gray eyes, a slight nasal twang in her New England voice, and a fresh flounce upon her old black alpaca dress—the first morning of her experience in an atelier des dames in Paris! She had come down the hill from her dark little room on Montmartre, fancying that the gray December day was crystalline, that the dingy Rue Germain Pillon—with its dirty gamins of both sexes in cropped hair and blouses or white caps and black gowns, its frowsy women slouching in doorways, its succession of odorous cuisines bourgeoises, vile-smelling lavoirs, cheap fruit-shops and plebeian crémeries, its slimy cobblestones, its gutters running not with laughing waters, and sending up scents not of spicy isles ensphered by sun-illumined seas—was a rainbow arch over which she passed with airy tread toward the Krug studio. For had she not at last finished for ever the detestable photograph-coloring which had been a daily crucifixion of all her artistic feelings for years? Had she not at last reached the Enchanted Land for which she had labored and pined for half her life? Had she not clothes enough to last her with patient mendings and persistent remakings for two years? Had she not a thousand dollars at the Crédit Lyonnais? And did not that stately entrance before her lead into a spacious courtyard, and that courtyard open upon the famous Atelier des Dames, where, at the feet of celebrated masters of form and color, she was to learn some of the mysteries of the art to which she had vowed her life?
