“That man is a fool,” the American would exclaim, dashing his brush across a whole morning’s work; “that man is a presumptuous fool who, here in Florence, here where those others have lived and died, dares to stand before an easel and imagine that he can paint—­and I have been that man!” He was wont to grow noisy and loquacious over his failures—­not moody and dumb, as some men do.

“You concern yourself too much,” M. Linders would reply calmly, putting the finishing touch to Madelon as a bergere standing in the midst of a flock of sheep, and a green landscape—­like the enlarged top of a bonbonniere.  “You are too ambitious, mon cher—­you are little, and want to be great—­hence your discomfort; whilst I, who am little, and know it, remain content.”

“May I be spared such content!” growled the other, who was daily exasperated by the atrocities his friend produced by way of pictures.  It was beyond his comprehension how any man could paint such to his disgrace, and then calmly contemplate them as the work of his own hands.  “Heaven preserve me from such content, I say!”

“But it is there you are all in the wrong,” says M. Linders, quite unmoved by his companion’s uncomplimentary energy.  “You agitate, you disturb yourself with the idea that some day you will become something great—­you begin to compare yourself with these men whose works you are for ever copying, with who knows? —­with Raffaelle, with Da Vinci——­”

“I compare myself with them!” cries the American, interrupting him.  “I!  No, mon ami, I am not quite such a fool as that.  I reverence them, I adore their memory, I bow down before their wonderful genius”—­and as he spoke he lifted his cap from his head, suiting his action to his words—­“but compare myself! —­ I!” Then picking up his brush again, he added, “But the world needs its little men as well as its great ones—­at any rate, the little ones need their pot au feu; so to work again. Allons, ma petite, your head a little more this way.”

This little conversation, which occurred nearly at the beginning of their acquaintance, the painter’s words and manner, his energy, his simple, dignified gesture as he raised his cap—­all made a great impression on our Madelon; it was indeed one of her first lessons in that hero-worship whereby lesser minds are brought into rapport with great ones; and, even while they reverence afar off, exultingly feel that they in some sort share in their genius through their power of appreciating it.  Nor was it her last lesson of the same kind.

Her second friend was an old German violinist, who inhabited two little rooms at the top of the big house, a tall, broad-shouldered, stooping man, whose thick yellow hair and moustache, plentifully mixed with grey, blue eyes, and fair complexion, testified to his nationality, as did his queer, uncouth accent, though he has spent at least two-thirds of his life in Florence.  He was an old friend of the American