But what was she going to do?  How was she going to live?  For, after all, much as she loved Paris, she couldn’t subsist on its air and sunshine.

‘Oh, never fear!  I’ll manage somehow.  I’ll not die of hunger,’ she said confidently.

IX.

And, sure enough, she managed very well.  She gave music lessons to the children of the Quarter, and English lessons to clerks and shop girls; she did a little translating; she would pose now and then for a painter friend—­she was the original, for instance, of Norton’s ’Woman Dancing,’ which you know.  She even—­thanks to the employment by Chalks of what he called his ’in_floo_ence’—­she even contributed a weekly column of Paris gossip to the Palladium, a newspaper published at Battle Creek, Michigan, U.S.A., Chalks’s native town.  ’Put in lots about me, and talk as if there were only two important centres of civilisation on earth, Battle Crick and Parus, and it’ll be a boom,’ Chalks said.  We used to have great fun, concocting those columns of Paris gossip.  Nina, indeed, held the pen and cast a deciding vote; but we all collaborated.  And we put in lots about Chalks—­perhaps rather more than he had bargained for.  With an irony (we trusted) too subtle to be suspected by the good people of Battle Creek, we would introduce their illustrious fellow-citizen, casually, between the Pope and the President of the Republic; we would sketch him as he strolled in the Boulevard arm-in-arm with Monsieur Meissonier, as he dined with the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy, or drank his bock in the afternoon with the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour; we would compose solemn descriptive criticisms of his works, which almost made us die of laughing; we would interview him—­at length—­about any subject; we would give elaborate bulletins of his health, and brilliant pen-pictures of his toilets.  Sometimes we would betroth him, marry him, divorce him; sometimes, when our muse impelled us to a particularly daring flight, we would insinuate, darkly, sorrowfully, that perhaps the great man’s morals ... but no!  We were persuaded that rumour accused him falsely.  The story that he had been seen dancing at Bullier’s with the notorious Duchesse de Z——­ was a baseless fabrication.  Unprincipled?  Oh, we were nothing if not unprincipled.  And our pleasure was so exquisite, and it worried our victim so.  ’I suppose you think it’s funny, don’t you?’ he used to ask, with a feint of superior scorn which put its fine flower to our hilarity.  ’Look out, or you’ll bust,’ he would warn us, the only unconvulsed member present.  ‘By gum, you’re easily amused.’  We always wrote of him respectfully as Mr. Charles K. Smith; we never faintly hinted at his sobriquet.  We would have rewarded liberally, at that time, any one who could have told us what the K. stood for.  We yearned to unite the cryptic word to his surname by a hyphen; the mere abstract