she didn’t; she knew where the earliest chestnut buds were to be found in the Bois, when the slopes of the Buttes Chaumont were green, and which was the old woman who sold the cheapest flowers before the Madeleine.  Alone and independent, she earned the affection of Madame Bibelot, the concierge, and, what was more, her confidence.  Her outgoings and incomings were never questioned.  The little American could take care of herself.  Ah, if her son Jacques were only as reasonable!  Miss Maynard might have made more friends had she cared; she might have joined hands with the innocent and light-hearted poverty of the coterie of her own artistic compatriots, but something in her blood made her distrust Bohemianism; her poverty was something to her too sacred for jest or companionship; her own artistic aim was too long and earnest for mere temporary enthusiasms.  She might have found friends in her own profession.  Her professor opened the sacred doors of his family circle to the young American girl.  She appreciated the delicacy, refinement, and cheerful equal responsibilities of that household, so widely different from the accepted Anglo-Saxon belief, but there were certain restrictions that rightly or wrongly galled her American habits of girlish freedom, and she resolutely tripped past the first etage four or five flights higher to her attic, the free sky, and independence!  Here she sometimes met another kind of independence in Monsieur Alphonse, aged twenty two, and she who ought to have been Madame Alphonse, aged seventeen, and they often exchanged greetings on the landing with great respect towards each other, and, oddly enough, no confusion or distrait.  Later they even borrowed each other’s matches without fear and without reproach, until one day Monsieur Alphonse’s parents took him away, and the desolated soi-disant Madame Alphonse, in a cheerful burst of confidence, gave Helen her private opinion of monsieur, and from her seventeen years’ experience warned the American infant of twenty against possible similar complications.

One day—­it was near the examination for prizes, and her funds were running low—­she was obliged to seek one of those humbler restaurants she knew of for her frugal breakfast.  But she was not hungry, and after a few mouthfuls left her meal unfinished as a young man entered and half abstractedly took a seat at her table.  She had already moved towards the comptoir to pay her few sous, when, chancing to look up in a mirror which hung above the counter, reflecting the interior of the cafe, she saw the stranger, after casting a hurried glance around him, remove from her plate the broken roll and even the crumbs she had left, and as hurriedly sweep them into his pocket-handkerchief.  There was nothing very strange in this; she had seen something like it before in these humbler cafes,—­it was a crib for the birds in the Tuileries Gardens, or the poor artist’s substitute for rubber in correcting his crayon drawing!