Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/39

Rh For, after all, much as she loved Paris, she couldn't subsist on its air and sunshine.

"Oh, never fear! I'll manage somehow. I'll not die of hunger," she said confidently.

And, sure enough, she managed very well. She gave music lessons to the children of the Quarter, and English lessons to clerks and shop-girls; she did a little translating; she would pose now and then for a painter friend—she was the original, for instance, of Norton's "Woman Dancing," which you know. She even—thanks to the employment by Chalks of what he called his "inflooence"—she even contributed a weekly column of Paris gossip to the Palladium, a newspaper published at Battle Creek, Michigan, U.S.A., Chalks's native town. "Put in lots about me, and talk as if there were only two important centres of civilisation on earth, Battle Crick and Parus, and it ll be a boom," Chalks said. We used to have great fun, concocting those columns of Paris gossip. Nina, indeed, held the pen and cast a deciding vote; but we all collaborated. And we put in lots about Chalks—perhaps rather more than he had bargained for. With an irony (we trusted) too subtle to be suspected by the good people of Battle Creek, we would introduce their illustrious fellow-citizen, casually, between the Pope and the President of the Republic; we would sketch him as he strolled in the Boulevard arm-in-arm with Monsieur Meissonier, as he dined with the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy, or drank his bock in the afternoon with the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour; we