“There is a nouveau here,” drawled Laffat, leaning around his easel and addressing his friend Bowles, “there is a nouveau here who is so tender and green and appetizing that Heaven help him if he should fall into a salad bowl.”
“Hayseed?” inquired Bowles, plastering in a background with a broken palette-knife and squinting at the effect with approval.
“Yes, Squeedunk or Oshkosh, and how he ever grew up among the daisies and escaped the cows, Heaven alone knows!”
Bowles rubbed his thumb across the outlines of his study to “throw in a little atmosphere,” as he said, glared at the model, pulled at his pipe and finding it out struck a match on his neighbour’s back to relight it.
“His name,” continued Laffat, hurling a bit of bread at the hat-rack, “his name is Hastings. He is a berry. He knows no more about the world,”—and here Mr. Laffat’s face spoke volumes for his own knowledge of that planet—“than a maiden cat on its first moonlight stroll.”
Bowles now having succeeded in lighting his pipe, repeated the thumb touch on the other edge of the study and said, “Ah!”
“Yes,” continued his friend, “and would you imagine it, he seems to think that everything here goes on as it does in his damned little backwoods ranch at home; talks about the pretty girls who walk alone in the street; says how sensible it is; and how French parents are misrepresented in America; says that for his part he finds French girls—and he confessed to only knowing one—as jolly as American girls. I tried to set him right, tried to give him a pointer as to what sort of ladies walk