common sense and the spirituelle"—here he turned half-hopefully to his auditor—"Or do you get it?"
But the other, who could let his reflections travel their designed course without delivering them up to chance companions, gazed at the picture in silence. He was presumably Latin, but not at all Gascon. His features, delicately moulded, were saved by the clean-cut conformation of jaw and skull. When he moved it was alertly, but out of action he seemed to possess a repose with which the poorly in formed rarely credit his race. The eye, too, was steady but sad. There was about him the air, bravely and gracefully borne, of one who had always played in hard luck, whose ancestors had bequeathed him, possibly an honoured name, most certainly a heritage of poverty, and with it, of fatalism.
A slight, but not disfiguring, scar on his cheek, and a touch of ribbon in his lapel, suggested some service in the Foreign Legion.
But Queer Hat was pleasantly meandering on,
"The figure, too, balks me. Somehow, simplicity seems to be the most complex thing in the world, the most difficult thing to arrive at. There's spring lilt—poise"
The Legionnaire now broke his silence
"Elan,—you mean—body and spirit pointe du pied—on tiptoe, you would say."
"By Jove, that's good—on tiptoe!" the other exclaimed, but the Frenchman went on as if he hadn't heard him.
"One has the impression of having seen her, somewhere before."
"You're not getting that American habit!" the painter not
