notion of doing so filled us with fearful joy.  Chalks was right, I dare say; we were easily amused.  And Nina, at these moments of literary frenzy—­I can see her now:  her head bent over the manuscript, her hair in some disarray, a spiral of cigarette-smoke winding ceilingward from between the fingers of her idle hand, her lips parted, her eyes gleaming with mischievous inspirations, her face pale with the intensity of her glee.  I can see her as she would look up, eagerly, to listen to somebody’s suggestion, or as she would motion to us to be silent, crying, ‘Attendez—­I’ve got an idea.’  Then her pen would dash swiftly, noisily, over her paper for a little, whilst we all waited expectantly; and at last she would lean back, drawing a long breath, and tossing the pen aside, to read her paragraph out to us.

In a word, she managed very well, and by no means died of hunger.  She could scarcely afford Madame Chanve’s three-franc table d’hote, it is true; but we could dine modestly at Leon’s, over the way, and return to the Bleu for coffee,—­though, it must be added, that establishment no longer enjoyed a monopoly of our custom.  We patronised it and the Vachette, the Source, the Ecoles, the Souris, indifferently.  Or we would sometimes spend our evenings in Nina’s rooms.  She lived in a tremendously swagger house in the Avenue de l’Observatoire,—­on the sixth floor, to be sure, but ‘there was a carpet all the way up.’  She had a charming little salon, with her own furniture and piano (the same that had formerly embellished our cafe), and no end of books, pictures, draperies, and pretty things, inherited from her father or presented by her friends.

By this time the inevitable had happened, and we were all in love with her,—­hopelessly, resignedly so, and without internecine rancour, for she treated us, indiscriminately, with a serene, impartial, tolerant, derision; but we were savagely, luridly, jealous and suspicious of all new-comers and of all outsiders.  If we could not win her, no one else should; and we formed ourselves round her in a ring of fire.  Oh, the maddening, mock-sentimental, mock-sympathetic face she would pull, when one of us ventured to sigh to her of his passion!  The way she would lift her eyebrows, and gaze at you with a travesty of pity, shaking her head pensively, and murmuring, ’Mon pauvre ami!  Only fancy!’ And then how the imp, lurking in the corners of her eyes, with only the barest pretence of trying to conceal himself, would suddenly leap forth in a peal of laughter!  She had lately read Mr. Howells’s ‘Undiscovered Country,’ and had adopted the Shakers’ paraphrase for love:  ’Feeling foolish.’—­’Feeling pretty foolish to-day, air ye, gentlemen?’ she inquired, mimicking the dialect of Chalks.  ’Well, I guess you just ain’t feeling any more foolish than you look.’—­If she would but have taken us seriously!  And the worst of it was that we knew she was anything but temperamentally cold.  Chalks formulated the potentialities we divined in her, when he remarked, regretfully, wistfully, as he often did, ‘She could love like Hell.’  Once, in a reckless moment, he even went so far as to tell her this pointblank.  ‘Oh, naughty Chalks!’ she remonstrated, shaking her finger at him.  ’Do you think that’s a pretty word?  But—­I dare say I could.’