by asking him his name and thrusting a card before him on the table. Dutifully he wrote it and she told him, briskly, with the bright hard smile of Parisians, the smile of the laundress in the rue Truffaut, to enter the door on the left. He had not mentioned his errand, but assumed that M. Ripert was so famous that one approached him by stages and through anterooms. So without remonstrance he opened the door à gauche.
And stood there in the doorway transfixed with horror and embarrassment!
Beneath him, in a small amphitheatre, sat a hundred young men and women, with sketch blocks before them, engrossed in the task of drawing the portrait of a girl who hadn't a stitch of clothing on. There she sat on the platform in an attitude that only a model could have got herself into, arms and legs going in every direction but a comfortable one, being as hard to draw as she could possibly be.
He felt that at any moment a gendarme might arise from some corner and eject him. To make matters worse there was no sign of anybody who might be M. Ripert. Not an eye was raised to greet or banish him. To retreat was difficult, for the door had been shut behind him by the businesslike young woman. He had never been so frightened and unhappy in his life.
At the height of his dismay a pale young man on the back bench looked up and saw his plight,—at least his external plight. Moving over on the bench he
