Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/133

 There is kinship in the arts, and she drifted into the Latin Quarter life. The rollicking students liked her; so did the painters who taught them. They enjoyed the wit and audacity of the little American. A great artist persuaded her to pose for him, and the picture, on the line at the Spring Salon, was the sensation of the year. It was only a face, a young and brilliant face, framed in a halo of red-gold hair, with brown eyes looking straight at the observer. There was a suggestion of white about the throat, and against this a gold cross. But the genius of the picture lay in the eyes. All of earth that French art and French imagination could put into them was there. Above the gold cross and the soft dimples in cheek and chin, the devil himself looked out of their brown depths. The artist called his picture, with grim humor, "The Convent Girl."

Half-tone reproductions of it filled the art journals of Europe, and were copied in the newspapers and magazines of America. The original of "The Convent Girl" became a subject for newspaper correspondence, stories, and other pictures. Famous artists sought her as a model. One of Paris's enterprising managers engaged her to sing a little song between the acts of a new comedy, and on her