"We have Immortal Souls," said he, in a tone of anguish and
affliction. "I ask you, as man to man: Is it our fault?"
It was these three Indians, then, who took Peter Champneys under
their wing, helped him find the pleasantest rooms in the Quartier,
helped him furnish them at about a third of what he would have paid
if left to his own devices, and also helped him to shed his skin of
a timid provincial by plunging him to the scalp in that bubbling
cauldron in which seethes the creative brain of France. Serious and
sad young men who were going to be poets; intense fellows who were
going to rehabilitate the Drama, or write the Greatest Novel;
illustrators, journalists, critics, painters, types in velvet coats,
flowing ties, flowing locks, and astonishing hats, sculptors, makers
of exquisite bits of craftsmanship, models, masters, singers of
sorts, actors and actresses, sewing-girls, frightful old concierges;
students from the four corners of the earth driven hither by the
four winds of heaven, came and went in the devil-may-care wake of
Stocks and the Checkleighs and disported themselves before the
reflective and appreciative eyes of Peter Champneys.
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