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Mr. Whitney Dibble languidly rose, drew a six-inch scarlet cigarette holder from his pocket, lighted a cigarette and flicked the ash off it with a disdainful forefinger. The cigarette holder, the languor, the disdain, and the flicking habit were all strictly new to him, and they were extremely disapproved of by his kind.

“I am not,” he breathed, “at all interested in your lowbrow plans. I am going to Paris to study art. In five years from now I shall be exh
ibiting in-in all those galleries you exhibit in. I hope you have success with your money-grubbing and your golf. Drop in to see me at my petit chteau when you’re abroad. I must dot out now and do a bit of sketching. ”

Whitney Dibble, riding a Pullman to greatness, arrived in Paris on an October day of pearl and amber. When he had dropped his baggage at his hotel, Whit walked out exultantly. The Place de la Concorde seemed to him a royal courtyard; Gabriel’s twin buildings of the Marine Ministry were the residences of emperors themselves. They seemed taller than the most pushing skyscraper of New York, taller and nobler and more wise.

All Paris spoke to him of a life at once more vivid and more demanding, less hospitable to intrusive strangers, than any he had known. He felt young and provincial, yet hotly ambitious.

Quivering with quiet exultation, he sat on a balcony that evening, watching the lights fret the ancient Seine, and next morning he scampered to the atelier of Monsieur Cyprien Schoelkopf, where he was immediately to be recognized as a genius.

He was not disappointed. Monsieur Schoelkopf (he was of the celebrated Breton family of Schoelkopf, he explained) had a studio right out of fiction; very long, very filthy, with a naked model on the throne. The girls wore smocks baggy at the throat, and the men wore corduroy jackets.

Monsieur Schoelkopf was delighted to accept Whit, also his ten thousand francs in advance.

Whit longed to be seated at an easel, whanging immortal paint onto a taut canvas. He’d catch the model’s very soul, make it speak through her eyes, with her mere body just indicated…. Great if his very first picture should be a salon piece!

But before leaping into grandeur he had to have a Bohemian background, and he went uneasily over the Left Bank looking for an apartment. (To live in comfort on the Right Bank would be bourgeois and even American. )

He rented an apartment ‘way out on the Avenue Flix-Faure. It was quiet and light—and Whit was tired.

That evening he went to the famous Caf Fanfaron, on the Boulevard Raspail, of which he had heard as the international (i. e. , American) headquarters for everything that was newest and most shocking in painting, poetry, and devastating criticism in little magazines.

In front of the caf the sidewalk was jammed with tables at which sat hundreds of young people, most of them laughing, most of them noticeable—girls in slinksy dresses, very low, young men with jaunty tweed jackets, curly hair and keen eyes; large men (and they seemed the most youthful of all) with huge beards that looked false.

Whit was waved to a table with a group of Americans. In half an hour he had made a date to go walking in the Bois de Boulogne with a large-eyed young lady named Isadora, he had been reassured that Paris was the one place in the world for a person with Creative Hormones, and he had been invited to a studio party by a lively man who was twenty-four as far up as the pouches beneath his eyes, and sixty-four above.