GOD KNOWS
At the rooms of some artists who formed a colony in the Avenue Frochot, I once knew a young girl of about 18 or 19 years of age—a rare type. She was the forewoman in a millinery department of a large and fashionable store. Every Sunday at an early hour she hurried to her artistic friends in the Avenue Frochot. She entered their quarters as if they were her own, not caring what the people who were there might think, simply saying:
"If I am in the way, send me off."
She was allowed to "circulate," to lounge, to look, at her own free will, to smoke, to sleep, to talk, to sing, to leave when the spirit moved her. A creature of impulse, of natural common sense, having learned nothing for learning's sake, she had acquired in her free life all she knew, which amounted to some knowledge of the piano, some solfege, Italian and English. She read all the printed matter she found, and remembered all she read. I had forgotten to say she was pretty (and it did not detract from her) pretty, very pretty, with a renaissance cameo profile, hair naturally waving, teeth so white, so even, so immaculate that she was made to laugh just to show her teeth. The strangest of all was, that no one ever doubted her perfect womanliness. After staying two or three hours, she would rise, put on her shawl and bonnet (without looking in the glass, so innate was her sense of adjustment); they were always rightly placed, and she would, disappearing, say: "I go to inflict myself elsewhere."
Her departure was as little noticed as had been her arrival.
