"It would be awful fun," said the other. "You'll go and work at the studio, and when you come home after your work I shall have cooked the déjeûner, and we shall have it together on a little table with a nice white cloth and a bunch of flowers on it."
"Yes; and in the evening we'll go out, to concerts and things, and ride on the tops of trams. And on Sundays--what does one do on Sundays?"
"I suppose one goes to church," said Paula.
"Oh, I think not when we're working so hard all the week. We'll go into the country."
"We can take the river steamer and go to St. Cloud, or go out on the tram to Clamart--the woods there are just exactly like the woods at home. What part of England do you live in?"
"Kent," said Betty.
"My home's in Devonshire," said Paula.
It was a hard day: so many stairs to climb, so many apartments to see! And all of them either quite beyond Betty's means, or else little stuffy places, filled to choking point with the kind of furniture no one could bear to live with, and with no light, and no outlook except a blank wall a yard or two from the window.
They kept to the Montparnasse quarter, for there, Paula said, were the best ateliers for Betty. They found a little restaurant, where only art students ate, and where one could breakfast royally for about a shilling. Betty looked with interest at the faces of the students, and wondered whether she should ever know any of them. Some of them looked interesting. A few were English, and fully half American.
Then the weary hunt for rooms began again.
It was five o'clock before a concierge, unexpected amiable in face of their refusal of her rooms, asked whether they had tried Madame Bianchi's--Madame Bianchi where the atelier was, and the students' meetings on Sunday evenings,--Number 57 Boulevard Montparnasse.
They tried it. One passes through an archway into a yard where the machinery, of a great laundry pulses half the week, up some wide wooden stairs--shallow, easy stairs--and on the first floor are the two rooms. Betty drew a long breath when she saw them. They were lofty, they were airy, they were light. There was not much furniture, but what there was was good--old carved armoires, solid divans and--joy of joys--in each room a carved oak, Seventeenth Century mantelpiece eight feet high and four feet deep.
"I must have these rooms!" Betty whispered. "Oh, I could make them so pretty!"