He had no notion of how to divide his canvas into squares—a device by which one makes it easier to get the copy into proper proportion, it seems. He began by sketching the head of the principal woman roughly in the middle of his canvas, and then he wanted to begin painting it at once—he was so impatient.
Students, female students especially, came and interested themselves in his work, and some rapins asked him questions, and tried to help him and give him tips. But the more they told him, the more helpless and hopeless he grew. He soon felt conscious he was becoming quite a funny man again—a centre of interest—in a new line; but it gave him no pleasure whatever.
After a week of this mistaken drudgery he sat despondent one afternoon on a bench in the Champs Élysées and watched the gay peo
