But the true note of this Bohemianism is not so much spontaneous friendship as a spontaneous capacity for the interchange of thought—­that instant opening of mind to mind, when place becomes of slight, and time of no importance.

Such an atmosphere was created by M. Lucien Cartel in his poor Montmartre appartement, and under its spell Max and Blake fell as surely, as luxuriously as they might have fallen under the spell of a summer day.  It was not that M. Cartel was brilliant; his only capacity for brilliance lay in his strong, square hands; but he was a good fellow and possessed of a philosophy that at once challenged and interested.  For Church and State he had a wide contempt, a scoffing raillery, a candid blasphemy that outraged orthodoxy:  for humanity and for his art he owned an enthusiasm touching on the sublime.  Upon every subject—­the meanest and the most profound—­he held an opinion and aired it with superb frankness and incredible fluency.  So it was that, when the poulet bonne femme had been picked to the bones and Jacqueline had retired to some sanctum whence the clatter of plates and the sound of running water told of domestic duties, the three pushed their chairs back from the table and fell to talk.

Precisely how they talked, precisely what they talked of in that pleasant period subsequent to the meal is not to be related.  They thrashed the paths of morality, science, religion until their contending voices filled the room and the tobacco smoke hung in clouds about them.  They talked until the last drop of Jacqueline’s coffee had been drained; they talked until Jacqueline herself came silently back into the room and seated herself by Cartel’s side, slipping her hand into his with artless spontaneity.

Morality, science, religion, and then, in natural sequence, art—­music!  The brain of M. Cartel tingled, his fingers twitched as the rival merits of composers—­the varying schools of thought—­were touched upon, warmed to, or torn by contending opinions.  One end only was conceivable to that last discussion.  The moment arrived when the brain of M. Cartel cried vehemently for expression, when his hand, imprisoned in the small fingers of Jacqueline, was no longer to be restrained, when he sprang from his chair and rushed to the piano, his coarse black hair an untidy mat, his ugly face alight with God’s gift of inspiration.

‘What had he said?  Was this, then, not magnificent—­wonderful?’

And, seating himself, he unloosed into the common room a beauty of sound more adorning than the rarest devices of the decorator’s art—­a mesh of delicate harmonies that snared the imaginations of his three listeners and sent them winging to the very borders of their varying realms.