“But why should you want to paint me?” asked the Spaniard.

Philip answered that the head interested him, he thought he could do a good portrait.

“I can’t afford the time.  I grudge every minute that I have to rob from my writing.”

“But it would only be in the afternoon.  I work at the school in the morning.  After all, it’s better to sit to me than to do translations of legal documents.”

There were legends in the Latin quarter of a time when students of different countries lived together intimately, but this was long since passed, and now the various nations were almost as much separated as in an Oriental city.  At Julian’s and at the Beaux Arts a French student was looked upon with disfavour by his fellow-countrymen when he consorted with foreigners, and it was difficult for an Englishman to know more than quite superficially any native inhabitants of the city in which he dwelt.  Indeed, many of the students after living in Paris for five years knew no more French than served them in shops and lived as English a life as though they were working in South Kensington.

Philip, with his passion for the romantic, welcomed the opportunity to get in touch with a Spaniard; he used all his persuasiveness to overcome the man’s reluctance.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said the Spaniard at last.  “I’ll sit to you, but not for money, for my own pleasure.”

Philip expostulated, but the other was firm, and at length they arranged that he should come on the following Monday at one o’clock.  He gave Philip a card on which was printed his name:  Miguel Ajuria.

Miguel sat regularly, and though he refused to accept payment he borrowed fifty francs from Philip every now and then:  it was a little more expensive than if Philip had paid for the sittings in the usual way; but gave the Spaniard a satisfactory feeling that he was not earning his living in a degrading manner.  His nationality made Philip regard him as a representative of romance, and he asked him about Seville and Granada, Velasquez and Calderon.  But Miguel bad no patience with the grandeur of his country.  For him, as for so many of his compatriots, France was the only country for a man of intelligence and Paris the centre of the world.

“Spain is dead,” he cried.  “It has no writers, it has no art, it has nothing.”

Little by little, with the exuberant rhetoric of his race, he revealed his ambitions.  He was writing a novel which he hoped would make his name.  He was under the influence of Zola, and he had set his scene in Paris.  He told Philip the story at length.  To Philip it seemed crude and stupid; the naive obscenity—­c’est la vie, mon cher, c’est la vie, he cried—­the naive obscenity served only to emphasise the conventionality of the anecdote.  He had written for two years, amid incredible hardships, denying himself all the pleasures of life which had attracted him to Paris, fighting with starvation for art’s sake, determined that nothing should hinder his great achievement.  The effort was heroic.