QU ARTIER LATIN ITIES 41 



and through with their immense needles as suddenly 

 and viciously as if they were transfixing an enemy. The 

 Boulevard is full of wheels, from the female cyclist 

 flitting by in her hideous knickerbockers, to the cart 

 drawn by five leviathan horses, with a tree thirty 

 feet high, in full leaf, standing erect upon it; and in 

 the thick of these, threading them with the stride and 

 the boot- heel of an alien civilisation, is the art student. 

 A tin milk-can swings from her bare hand, a long 

 pennyworth of bread, slightly draped in tissue paper, 

 is under her arm; the other hand grasps an orange, 

 and the gloves that some superstitious recollection of 

 the proprieties prompts her to carry. She has bought 

 her breakfast an hour later than usual — Sunday being 

 observed in her studio as a holiday — she will cook it 

 over a spirit-lamp on her washhandstand, she will 

 partake of it out of a tin cup, she will wash up the 

 breakfast service with more or less conscientiousness, 

 according to disposition, or the influence of religion, 

 and then she will make her toilet. 



Improbable as it may seem to those who see her 

 only during the working hours of the week, she has 

 distinct aspirations on the subject of dress. In 

 obedience to an almost irresistible instinct of her kind 

 she wears cinnamon-brown or myrtle-green gowns, 

 cut very low at the neck, without any attempt to fill 

 up deficiencies with lace or other washable materials ; 

 but the rock on which she splits is a fatal wavering 

 between the artistic and the fashionable. Sir E. 

 Burne-Jones and M. Puvis de Chavannes are possibly 

 responsible for the cinnamon-brown or the myrtle- 

 green hue of her garments, and also for the extent 

 of neck which is left uncovered ; but the Bon Marche's 

 culpability is equal to theirs in placing on her straying 

 locks the horse-shoes of acute magenta roses, the 

 eccentric straw hats tufted with bunches of livid pink 



