were studying art and devoting our best energies to the cult of the beautiful, we considered it our duty to take special notice of these pretty girls wherever we came across them.  It is probably the conscientious performance of his duty in that direction which enabled du Maurier to evolve those ever-attractive and sympathetic types of female beauty we are all so familiar with.  Nor would it have been becoming in me, who had everything to learn, to lag behind, or to show less ardour in the pursuit of my studies.

[Illustration:  THE INGENIOUS USE WHICH RAG MAKES OF BOBTAIL’S PLIABLE HAT.]

Thus, whilst du Maurier’s facile pen was throwing off black and white sketches of Miss Carry, it was reserved for me to paint her portrait in oils.  Her real name was Octavie, not Carry; that appellation we had most unceremoniously and unpoetically derived from “Cigar.”  All else about her we invested, if not with ceremony with a full amount of poetry.  And certainly there was a subtle quality in Carry, well worthy of appreciation, a faculty of charming and being charmed, of giving and taking, of free and easiness, coupled with ladylike reserve.  She seemed to be born with the intuitive knowledge that there was only one life worth living, that of the Bohemian, and to be at the same time well protected by a pretty reluctance to admit as much.  In fact, to give a correct idea of her I need but say her soul was steeped in the very essence of Trilbyism.  Having got to Carry’s soul, it may not be inappropriate to say something also about her looks; but to describe good looks is, as we all know, deliberately to court failure; far better request every man to conjure up his own type of beauty and he will be sure to be interested in the picture he evolves.  That man will be nearest the truth whose young lady has a rich crop of brown curly hair, very blue inquisitive eyes, and a figure of peculiar elasticity.

Octavie L., dite Carry, was the daughter of an organist who had held a good position at one of the principal churches of Malines.  When he died he left but a small inheritance to his widow; with what she could realise, she purchased the goodwill of a small tobacconist’s store and set up in business.  Neither the mother nor the daughter had much previous knowledge of the concern they had started, and they were consequently not very discriminating in the selection of their brands; but what was lacking in connoisseurship was fully made up for by Mrs. L.’s obliging manners and by Octavie’s blue eyes.  These had been steadily gaining in expression since she first opened them about seventeen years back.  Customers soon came in, and for a time the little business was as flourishing as anything could well be in Malines.  The average citizen of so ecclesiastically conservative, and hereditarily stationary a city could hardly be expected to encourage a new venture of the kind.  Still even there there were some young men about town, a sort of “jeunesse