She had a short, sharp struggle with her American taste for simple elegance in dress, and overthrew it, aiming, with some success, at originality instead.
She found it easy in Paris to invest her striking personality in a distinctive costume, sufficiently becoming and sufficiently odd, of which a broad soft felt hat, which made a delightful brigand of her, and a Hungarian cloak formed important features.

The Hungarian cloak suited her so extremely well that artistic considerations compelled her to wear it occasionally, I fear, when other people would have found it uncomfortably warm.

In nothing that she said or did or admired or condemned was there any trace of the commonplace, except, perhaps, the desire to avoid it; it had become her conviction that she owed this to herself.

She was thoroughly popular in the atelier, her _petits soupers_ were so good, her enthusiasms so generous, her drawing so bad.

The other pupils declared that she had a head _divinement tragique_, and for those of them she liked she sometimes posed, filling impressive parts in their weekly compositions.