I FINISHED my copies in four days, and they were scarcely dry when I carried them down to Jacobs. He examined them as if he were buying some material by the yard. I felt very nervous as he looked at them. Then he grunted, went over to his desk and wrote me a check for thirty dollars and fifteen cents. Menna told me he sold them for a couple of hundred if not more. He handed me the check with the remark:

“They will do. It takes a man to do a piece of work right.”

For a time Menna had very little work for me. There were slack times when he had not enough for himself, and he would get very discouraged. Sometimes he would gather up all the paintings he had made and say:

“Go and slaughter them to those damned frame-makers, Ascough, and sell them for what you can get—anything.”

I would remonstrate with him, and point out that if he would wait and not be in such a hurry for his money we could get better prices.

“Hang it all,” he would shout, “what’s the use?”

So long as he had a few dollars to sit at some table with friends and order beer, he would sacrifice, or as he called it “slaughter,” anything and everything.

As work was now very scarce, I decided to see Fisher about the posing. So I went across the hall and knocked at his door.

“Hello, Miss Ascough,” he called out cheerily, as I came in. “Come on in and sit down. You seem pretty busy in Menna’s studio. What are you doing for him?”

“Oh, I help him paint,” I said, “and sell his work for him, and sometimes I pose. That’s what I want to ask you about now. Wouldn’t you like me to pose for you and your friends? I hear you all sketch together once a week.”

“We’ll be glad to have you,” he declared cordially, his eye scanning me admiringly. “Why didn’t you speak before?”

“Well, I’ve been pretty busy with Mr. Menna, but work’s slack now. So, if you like, I can give you some time.”

“Good. See Bonnat about it. He generally engages the model, and we’re to work in his room next time. Have you met him?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess you have heard him,” laughed Fisher. “He certainly makes enough noise. When he first moved in here, we used to be wakened up early in the morning by him stamping up the stairs from the bathroom, carrying his bucket of water. There’s no water on his floor, and the way he stamped and cussed as he went up those two flights of stairs was enough to awaken the dead, and all the stairs would be splashed with water. We thought that cross old Mary, the caretaker, would go for him (as she can), but she never said a word to him. Just went to work and wiped up the water every morning. That comes of being a good-looker.”

“Is he so handsome, then?”

Fisher himself was a homely, red-haired little fellow.

“You bet he is,” he said, “as handsome as they make ’em, so don’t get stuck on him, as we want to keep Bonnat here. What’s more, he paints like he looks—great! wonderful! He’ll make his mark yet. Go along and see him now. ‘Raus mit you!”

So, leaving Fisher’s studio, I climbed the stairs to the top floor, and, turning to the left, I saw a door with a card nailed on it, bearing the name of Paul Bonnat. I stood and looked at the door for some time, and then I knocked. The door was opened with a jerk, and standing in the doorway was a young giant, whose head seemed to reach the top of the door. His hair was all sticking up. It was fair, and the eyes that looked at me questioningly were blue. He had a wide, clever mouth, and a chin that was like a cleft rock. As I stared up at him, his face smiled all over, so that I was forced to smile in return, and I thought to myself:

“Why, he looks like a young viking.” Somehow he made me think of my father, in coloring and the northern type of face, but this man had a more distinct personality that seemed almost to strike one. Papa was gentle and a dreamer. Bonnat was vitally alive.

“Mr. Fisher told me you wanted a model.”

He nodded and his big glance, still smiling, looked me over.

“Come in, come in.”

He was about twenty-six or seven, and in spite of the two hundred pounds Menna told me he weighed, he was not the least bit fat.

I was now in the room, and I glanced about me. Never have I seen such an untidy room in my life. It was not dirty, but simply littered up with things.

“Sit down,” he said, sweeping off some drawings and papers on to the floor from a chair that was loaded. There was also a glass of water on the chair, and he tipped that off, too, and the water ran on the floor.

“Oh,” I gasped, “do you always throw everything on the floor like that?”

“Not everything,” he answered, grinning. Then he handed me a box of cigarettes. I took one, and he began to look for a match. On the couch, the table and on all the chairs were piled papers, paints, brushes, clothes, boots and all manner of articles. It looked as if he never put anything where it belonged. Even his clothes were not hung up. On the walls were sketches, paintings, a pair of fencing swords, and the floor could scarcely be seen, as it also was covered with articles, and there were boxes of cigarette stumps and several empty glasses and bottles. As he hunted for the matches, he tumbled one thing after another on the floor.

I was possessed with a desire to tidy up that room. My hands were literally itching to go to work upon it. He seemed so helpless among all his belongings.

“Got it at last!” he laughed, as he discovered the box of matches on the window sill, and, striking one, he offered me a light. I never cared for smoking, but as I was always expected to smoke I usually accepted to save the bother of refusing and being urged.

“It’s the devil to be in such a small hole,” he said. “I seem to spend all my time looking for things. Well, now, let’s see. You’re going to pose for us, are you? Is next Sunday all right, or do you have to go to confess something?” He asked the question teasingly, as if he enjoyed poking fun at me.

“No, I never go to church,” I admitted.

A shocked look came into his face, and he opened his mouth wide.

“What? You are a heathen!”

He threw back his head and burst into the loudest and most infectious laughter I have ever heard.

“Then it’s all settled,” he said. “Now I have to go to lunch. Want to come along and have a bum lunch with me?”

I nodded, and he said: “Good!” hunted around for his hat, stuck it jauntily on his head, and, taking me by the arm, we went down the stairs.

When we were sitting in the little restaurant near Sixth Avenue, he asked me a lot of questions about myself, and before I knew it I had told him all about my father and mother and brothers and sisters and the work I had done in Montreal. Then I told him of the hard times I had in Boston. He seemed intensely interested, and when I got through he rattled off a lot of hard-luck stories about the artists, and told me something about the exigencies and makeshifts that all of them had had. He’d tell one story of hard luck after another, not as if it were something to feel badly about, but as if it were the common lot of every one. I think he did that so I wouldn’t think I myself had been especially singled out by fate.

He told me how only a few months before Fisher and he and “a couple of other guys” were all “broke,” and none of them had enough cash to buy a separate meal-ticket which entitled him to six meals for one dollar and a quarter, instead of twenty-five cents each meal. So they had all chipped in together and bought one ticket between them on the third of July. Well, when they went to dinner on the fourth of July to the Little Waldorf on Eighth Avenue, they were confronted by this sign:

“The landlord has gone away for a holiday, and will return next week.”

Bonnat seemed to think that an immense joke. He said every one in Paresis Row had had some such experience.

He wanted to know where I lived and I told him Fifteenth Street, and then he asked suddenly:

“Alone?” When I answered “yes” he smiled beamingly at me. Then he took me home, and lifting his hat in going, said:

“You’re engaged then. Sunday. Good-bye.” I could see him striding down the street, his head up, and his broad shoulders thrown back. He whistled as he went along.