and “The Grampus,” and he once saw a terrifyingly truthful portrait of “Rabbits” sketched on a skittish model’s bare back, and a movingly realistic little figure of “The Grampus” modeled by her dutiful nephew in a moment of diabolical inspiration.  It was explained to him that God, for some inscrutable purpose of his own, generally pleases himself by bestowing only the most limited human intelligence upon the wealthy relatives of poor but gifted artists; but that if properly approached, and at not too frequent intervals, they may be induced to loosen their tight purse-strings.  Wherefore one must somehow manage to keep on good terms with them.  Witness, Stocks said, his forgiving—­nay, kindly—­attitude toward The Grampus; see how he went to her house and drank her loathly tea and ate her beastly little cakes, even though she regarded a promising sculptor as a sort of unpromising stone-cutter who couldn’t hold down a steady job, and had vehemently urged him to go in for building and contracting in Sacramento, California.  “And yet that woman has got about all the money there is in our family!” finished Stocks, bitterly.

“Rabbits takes you aside and talks to you heart to heart,” said the younger Checkleigh, gloomily.  The elder Checkleigh’s face took on a look of martyrdom.

“We have Immortal Souls,” said he, in a tone of anguish and affliction.  “I ask you, as man to man:  Is it our fault?”

It was these three Indians, then, who took Peter Champneys under their wing, helped him find the pleasantest rooms in the Quartier, helped him furnish them at about a third of what he would have paid if left to his own devices, and also helped him to shed his skin of a timid provincial by plunging him to the scalp in that bubbling cauldron in which seethes the creative brain of France.  Serious and sad young men who were going to be poets; intense fellows who were going to rehabilitate the Drama, or write the Greatest Novel; illustrators, journalists, critics, painters, types in velvet coats, flowing ties, flowing locks, and astonishing hats, sculptors, makers of exquisite bits of craftsmanship, models, masters, singers of sorts, actors and actresses, sewing-girls, frightful old concierges; students from the four corners of the earth driven hither by the four winds of heaven, came and went in the devil-may-care wake of Stocks and the Checkleighs and disported themselves before the reflective and appreciative eyes of Peter Champneys.  These gay Bohemians laughed at him for what Stocks called his spinterishness, but ended by loving him as only youth can love a comrade.

In six months he knew the Quartier to the core.  He met men who were utter blackguards, whose selfish, cold-blooded brutality filled him with loathing; he met women with the soul of the cat.  But the Quartier as a whole was sound-hearted; Peter himself was too sound-hearted not to know.  He met Youth at work, his own kind of work.  They were all going to do something great presently,—­and presently many of them did.  The very air he breathed stimulated him.  Here were comrades, to whom, as to himself, art was the one supremely important thing in the universe.  They, too, were climbers toward the purple heights.