From A Bench In Our Square

In the bustling New York neighborhood of Our Square, a sidewalk artist named Peter Quick Banta discovers an extraordinary gift in Julien Tennier, a ragged street boy who can draw with instinctive brilliance. With help from the narrator and the Bonnie Lassie, Julien is educated, trained, and launched toward a future that seems to promise real artistic greatness. But as he grows up, talent collides with necessity: Julien drifts into practical, humiliating work to earn money, even as others insist he was meant to paint. Into this world comes Roberta "Bobbie" Holland, a wealthy young reformer and patron of the arts whose energy, beauty, and good intentions unsettle everyone she meets. Her curiosity about Julien leads to portrait sittings in his stark attic studio, where art, class, and attraction begin to blur. The Bonnie Lassie quietly engineers the whole affair, determined to pull Julien back toward serious painting and to force him to choose between worldly compromise and artistic destiny. Alongside this bohemian comedy of ambition and affection runs a darker moral thread: the burial of Minna Merivale, the judgment of the dead, and the struggle between rigid piety and mercy. Through funerals, private guilt, and sudden reversals, the story explores compassion, repentance, and the surprising grace that can emerge in the most unlikely corners of city life. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.