Leonard Merrick

“ On the tenth day, instead of the young man, a woman went to the statue, and stood before it just as stupidly, and as long as he had done. The most comical bit was that, when she turned away at last, it was seen that the statue had been making the woman cry. After that, neither of the funny pair came back to the Square Carnot; but, as Ada Simpson chooses the same bench still, she sometimes recalls their queerness and, before her mind wanders, tries again to guess their game. This was the game that Ada Simpson tries to guess. ”

“ My face is ignorant; the statue has more mind than I!"
He no longer said, "It is not that!" He drooped before her, dumb, contrite.
After a long pause, she quavered, dabbing at her eyes:
"Well, I am not an idiot; I should improve!"
"Is it an imbecile like me who could teach you?"
"I should be content."
"Never in a single hour! I fell in love with an ideal, and went to look for it. Failure was ordained. It is I who lack sense, not you." ”

“ She was a model—not one of the wretched models that wait at the corner of the Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse on Mondays to crave the vote of students in academies: she went by appointment to the ateliers of the successful. But now the painters and the sculptors were all at the seaside, and her appointment-book had shown no sitting for ever so long.
Gaby's qualities had never placed her among the stars of her profession. Nobody had ever said of her, as a great man said of one of the most celebrated of models, that he had only to reproduce her faithfully. ”

“ When criticism of France flagged, Ada Simpson occasionally observed. So, as she always entered the square at the same end and nearly always chose the same bench, she observed the eccentric proceedings of a young man who took to coming every morning to stare at the statue on the opposite grass-plot. After standing before it as if he were glued there, the young man would reverse one of the chairs that faced the path in an orderly line, and then sit mooning at the statue, with his back to everybody, for nearly an hour. It was, Miss Simpson surmised, a statue to a departed Frenchy. ”

“ The Paradis des Artistes was a small establishment where for three francs one found a homely dinner, inclusive of wine, and a cripple who wore a red jacket, to look like a Tzigane, and chanted to a mandolin. The artistes were chiefly models and the lesser lights of a café-concert. ”

“ Still less could it be asserted that she had the genius to penetrate an artist's purport and present the pose that was eluding him. But, if she had neither the beauty of a Sarah Brown nor the intuition of a Dubosc, her face possessed a certain attractiveness, and she could achieve the expression demanded of her when it had been laboriously explained. ”

“ But, if he hadn't a studio, where did he expect her to "sit"? Did he want her to go to him in the country? Yes, that must be it. Flûte! Gaby didn't think it would be good enough. The end of the dead season was in sight at last, and in Paris she would often be booked for two sittings a day. Nevertheless she was eager to hear what he had to say for himself. She answered that he could see her at seven o'clock the following evening at the Paradis des Artistes, round the corner. ”

“ When a bill for twenty-nine francs fifty was presented to him, after the café filtré and Egyptian cigarettes, Gaby put out her hand for it, and knocked off four francs without discussion. "I don't let them make their little mistakes with friends of mine," she told him languidly, rising. ”