Anabel does, and he retires, cheerfully unconscious of anything unconventional in the episode.

“Jimmy,” calls Louise, the fashion illustrator, from the front door, one day, “I have to have two dollars to pay my gas bill.  Got any?”

“One-sixty,” floats down a voice from upstairs.

“Chuck it down, please.  I’ll be getting some pay tomorrow, and we can blow it in.”

So Jimmy chucks it down.  Louise is a nice girl, and would merrily “chuck” him the same amount if she happened to have it.  That’s all there is to it.

There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the wickedness or at least the impropriety of Greenwich Village—­and some of the talk is by people who ought to know better.  The Village is, to be sure, entirely unconventional and incurably romantic and dramatic in its tastes.  It is appallingly honest, dangerously young in spirit and it is rather too intense sometimes, keyed up unduly with ambition and emotion and the eagerness of living.  But wicked?  Not a bit of it!

And the heavenly, inconsequent, infectious, absurd gaiety of it!

The Lady Who Owns the Parrot (Pollypet is the bird’s name) appears in a new hat; a gorgeous, new hat, with a band of scarlet and green feathers.

“Whence the more than Oriental splendour?” demands in surprise the Poet from the Third Floor, who knows that the Lady is not patronising Fifth Avenue shops at present.

“Pollypet is moulting!” explains the Lady of the Parrot, with a laugh.

Dear, merry, kindly, pitiful life of the studios!—­irresponsible, perhaps, and not of vast economic importance, but so human and so enchanting; so warm when it is bitter cold, so rich when the larder is empty, so gay when disappointment and failure are sitting wolf-like at the door.

A rich woman who loves the Village and often-times goes down there to buy her gifts rather than get them from the more conservative places uptown, told me that once when she went to a Village gift-shop to purchase a number of presents, she found the proprietor away.  She was asked to pick out what she wanted, and make a list.  She did.  Nobody even questioned her accuracy.  The next time she went she had a friend with her, who was, I imagine, more or less thrilled by the notion of approaching the bad, bold city,—­she was from out of town.  The shopkeeper was out in the back garden dressed in blue overalls and shirt, hoeing vigorously.

“Is this the heart of Bohemia?” demanded the astonished provincial.

After their purchases were made and done up, they wanted twine.  Don’t forget, please, that this was a shop.

“Twine?” murmured the picturesque proprietor gently.  “Of course I should have some; I must remember to get some twine!”

The sympathies are always ready there, the pennies too, when there are any!  A lame man, a sick woman, a little child, a forlorn dog or cat,—­they have only to go and sit on the steps of one of those blessed studio buildings, to receive pity, help and cheer.  And—­ye gods!—­isn’t the fact well known!  And isn’t it taken advantage of, just!  The swift, unreasoning charity of these Bohemians is so well recognised that it is a regular graft for the unscrupulous.