And Audrey was now of the Quarter.  Many simple sojourners in the Quarter tried to imply the Latin Quarter when they said the Quarter.  But the Quarter was only the Montparnasse Quarter.  Nevertheless, it sufficed.  It had its own boulevards, restaurants, cafes, concerts, theatres, palaces, shops, gardens, museums, and churches.  There was no need to leave it, and if you were a proper amateur of the Quarter, you never did leave it save to scoff at other Quarters.  Sometimes you fringed the Latin Quarter in the big cafes of the Boulevard St. Michel, and sometimes you strolled northwards as far as the Seine, and occasionally even crossed the Seine in order to enter the Louvre, which lined the other bank, but you did not go any farther.  Why should you?

Audrey had become so acclimatised to the Quarter that Miss Nickall’s studio seemed her natural home.  It was very typically a woman’s studio of the Quarter.  About thirty feet each way and fourteen feet high, with certain irregularities of shape, it was divided into corners.  There were the two bed-corners, which were lounge-corners during the day; the afternoon-tea corner, with a piece or two of antique furniture and some old silk hangings, where on high afternoons tea was given to droves of visitors; and there was the culinary corner, with spirit-lamps, gas-rings, kettles, and a bowl or two over which you might spend a couple of arduous hours in ineffectually whipping up a mayonnaise for an impromptu lunch.  Artistic operations were carried out in the middle of the studio, not too far from the stove, which never went out from November to May.  A large mirror hung paramount on one wall.  The remaining spaces of the studio were filled with old easels, canvases, old frames, old costumes and multifarious other properties for pictures, trunks, lamps, boards, tables, and bric-a-brac bought at the Ham-and-Old-Iron Fair.  There were a million objects in the studio, and their situations had to be, and were, learnt off by heart.  The scene of the toilette was a small attached chamber.

The housekeeping combined the simplicity of the early Christians with the efficient organising of the twentieth century.  It began at about half-past seven, when unseen but heard beings left fresh rolls and the New York Herald or the Daily Mail at the studio door.  You made your own bed, just as you cleaned your own boots or washed your own face.  The larder consisted of tins of coffee, tea, sugar, and cakes, with an intermittent supply of butter and lemons.  The infusing of tea and coffee was practised in perfection.  It mattered not in the least whether toilette or breakfast came first, but it was exceedingly important that the care of the stove should precede both.  Between ten and eleven the concierge’s wife arrived with tools and utensils; she swept and dusted under a considerable percentage of the million objects—­and the responsibilities of housekeeping were finished until the next day, for afternoon tea, if it occurred, was a diversion and not a toil.