"_Moi aussi, mademoiselle,
je suis artist!_" She had learned nothing, she had absorbed
everything. It seemed to her that she had entered into
her inheritance, and that in the possessions that throng
the Quartier Latin she was born to be rich. In thinking
this she had an Overpowering realization of the poverty
of Sparta, so convincing that she found it unnecessary
to tell herself that she would never go back there. That
was the unconscious pivotal supposition in everything
she thought or said or did. After the first bewildering
day or two when the exquisite thrill of Paris captured
her indefinitely, she felt the full tide of her life turn
and flow steadily in a new direction with a delight of
revelation and an ecstasy of promise that made nothing
in its sweep of every emotion that had not its birth and
growth in art, and forbade the mere consideration of
anything that might be an obstacle, as if it were a sin.
She entered her new world with proud recognition of its
unwritten laws, its unsanctified morale, its riotous
overflowing ideals; and she was instant in gathering that
to see, to comprehend these was to be thrice blessed, as
not to see, not to comprehend them was to dwell in outer
darkness with the bourgeois, and the "sandpaper" artists,
and others who are without hope.
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