They all knew the little appartement in the Rue Porte Royale, more or less well according to the favor with which they were received.
Nadie Palicsky perhaps knew it best--Nadie Palicsky and her friend Monsieur Andre Vambery, who always accompanied her when, she came to Elfrida's in the evening, finding it impossible to allow her to be out alone at night, which Nadie confessed agreeable to her vanity, but a bore.
Elfrida found it difficult in the beginning to admire the friend.

He was too small for dignity, and Nadie's inspired comparison of his long black hair to "_serpents noirs_" left her unimpressed.

Moreover she thought she detected about him a personal odor which was neither that of sanctity nor any other abstraction.

It took time and conversation and some acquaintance with values as they obtain at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the knowledge of what it meant to be "selling," to lift Monsieur Vambery to his proper place in her regard.

After that she blushed that he had ever held any other.