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Zut and Other Parisians/The Next Corner

The Next Corner
Anthony Cazeby was a man whom the felicitous combination of an adventurous disposition, sufficient ready money, and a magnificent constitution had introduced to many and various sensations, but he was conscious that, so far as intensity went, no one of them all had approached for a moment that with which he emerged from the doorway of the Automobile Club, and, winking at the sting of the keen winter air, looked out across the place de la Concorde, with its globes of light, swung, like huge pearls on invisible strings, across the haze of the January midnight. He paused for a moment, as if he would allow his faculties to obtain a full and final grasp of his situation, and motioned aside the trim little club chasseur who stood before him, with one cotton-gloved hand stretched out expectantly for a supposititious carriage-check.

“Va, mon petit, je vais à pied!”

Afoot! Cazeby smiled to himself at the tone of sudden caprice which rang in his voice, and, turning his fur collar high up about his ears, swung off rapidly toward the Cours la Reine. After all, the avenue d’Eylau was only an agreeable stroll’s length distant. Why not go home afoot? But then, on the other hand, why go home at all? As this thought leaped suddenly at Cazeby’s throat out of the void of the great unpremeditated, he caught his breath, stopped suddenly in the middle of the driveway, and then went on more slowly, thinking hard.

It had been that rarissima avis of social life, even in Paris, a perfect dinner. Cazeby had found himself wondering, at more than one stage of its smooth and imposing progress, how the Flints could afford to do it. But on each recurrence of the thought he dismissed it with a little frown of vexation. If there was one thing more than another upon which Cazeby prided himself, it was originality of thought, word, and deed, and he was annoyed to find himself, even momentarily, on a mental level with the gossips of the American and English colonies, whose time is equally divided between wondering how the Choses can afford to do what they do, and why the Machins cannot afford to do what they leave undone.

People had said many things of Hartley Flint, and still more of his wife, but no one had ever had the ignorance or the perversity to accuse them of inefficiency in the matter of a dinner. Moreover, on this particular occasion, they were returning the hospitality of the Baroness Klemftt, who had, at the close of the Exposition, impressed into her service the chef of the Roumanian restaurant, and whose dinners were, in consequence, the wonder and despair of four foreign colonies. After her latest exploit Hartley Flint had remarked to his wife that it was “up to them to make good,” which, being interpreted, was to say that it was at once his duty and his intention to repay the Baroness in her own sterling coin. The fact that the men of the party afterwards commended Hartley’s choice of wines, and that the women expressed the opinion that “Kate Flint looked really pretty!” would seem to be proof positive that the operation of “making good” had been an unqualified success.

Now, Cazeby was wondering whether he had actually enjoyed it all. Under the circumstances it seemed to him incredible, and yet he could not recall a qualm of uneasiness from the moment when the maître d’hôtel had thrown open the doors of the private dining room, until the Baroness had smiled at her hostess out of a cloud of old Valenciennes, and said, “Now there are two of us who give impeccable dinners, Madame Flint.” Even now, even facing his last ditch, Cazeby was conscious of a little thrill of self-satisfaction. He had said the score of clever things which each of his many hostesses expected of him, and had told with great effect his story of the little German florist, which had grown, that season, under the persuasive encouragement of society’s applause, from a brief anecdote into a veritable achievement of Teutonic dialect. Also, he had worn a forty franc orchid, and had left it in his coffee-cup because it had begun to wilt. In brief, he had been Anthony Cazeby at his extraordinary best, a mixture of brilliancy and eccentricity, without which, as Mrs. Flint was wont to say, no dinner was complete.

But the sublime and the ridiculous are not the only contrasting conditions that lie no further than a step apart, and Cazeby was painfully conscious of having, in the past five minutes, crossed the short interval which divides gay from grave. Reduced to its lowest terms, his situation lay in his words to the little chasseur. With the odor of the rarest orchid to be found in Vaillant-Rozeau’s whole establishment yet clinging to his lapel, Anthony Cazeby was going home on foot because the fare from the Concorde to the avenue d’Eylau was one franc fifty, and one franc fifty precisely ninety centimes more than he possessed in the world. For a moment he straightened himself, threw back his head, and looked up at the dull saffron of the low-hanging sky, in an attempt to realize this astounding fact, and then went back to his thinking.

Well, it was not surprising. The life of a popular young diplomat with extravagant tastes is not conducive to economy, and the forty thousand dollars which had come to Cazeby at the beginning of his twenty-eighth year had proved but a bad second best in the struggle with Parisian gayety. His bibelots, his servants, Auteuil, Longchamp, his baccarat at the Prince de Tréville’s, a dancer at the Folies-Marigny, Monte Carlo, Aix, Trouville, — they had all had their share, and now the piper was waiting to be paid and the exchequer was empty. It was an old story. Other men of his acquaintance had done the same, but they had had some final resource. The trouble was, as Cazeby had already noted, that, in his case, the final resource was not, as in theirs, pecuniary. Quite on the contrary, it was a tidy little weapon, of Smith and Wesson make, which lay in the upper right hand drawer of his marqueterie desk. He had looked long at it that same afternoon, with all his worldly wealth, in the shape of forty-two francs sixty, spread out beside it. That was before he had taken a fiacre to Vaillant-Rozeau’s.

At the very moment when Cazeby was contemplating these doubtful assets, a grim old gentleman was seated at another desk, three thousand miles away, engaged upon a calculation of the monthly profits derived from a wholesale leather business. But Cazeby père was one of the hopeless persons who believe in economy. He was of the perverted opinion that money hardly come by should be thoughtfully spent, or, preferably, invested in government bonds, and he had violent prejudices against “industrials,” games of chance, and young men who preferred the gayety of a foreign capital to the atmosphere of “the Swamp.” Also he was very rich. But Anthony had long since ceased to regard his father as anything more than a chance relation. He could have told what would be the result of a frank confession of his extremity as accurately as if the avowal had been already made. There would have been some brief reference to the sowing of oats and their reaping, to the making of a metaphorical bed and the inevitable occupancy thereof, and to other proverbial illustrations which, in a financial sense, are more ornamental than useful, — and nothing more. The essential spark of sympathy had been lacking between these two since the moment when the most eminent physician in New York had said, “It is a boy, sir, — but — we cannot hope to save the mother.” The fault may have lain on the one side, or the other, or on both, or on neither; but certain it is that to Anthony’s imagination Cazeby senior had never appealed in the light of a final resource.

Somehow, in none of his calculations had the idea of invoking assistance ever played a part. Naturally, as a reasoning being, he had foreseen the present crisis for some months, but at the time when the inevitable catastrophe first became clear to him it was already too late to regain his balance, since the remainder of his inheritance was so pitifully small that any idea of retrieving his fortunes through its instrumentality was simply farcical. The swirl of the rapids, as he had then told himself, had already caught his boat. All that was left to do was to go straighten to the sheer of the fall, with his pennant flying and himself singing at the helm. Then, on the brink, a well-placed bullet — no bungling for Anthony Cazeby! — and the next day people would be talking of the shocking accident which had killed him in the act of cleaning his revolver, and saying the usual things about a young man with a brilliant future before him and everything in life for which to live.

And this plan he had carried out in every detail — save the last, to which he was now come; and his was the satisfying conviction that not one of the brilliant, careless men and women, among whom he lived, and moved, and had his being, suspected for a moment that the actual circumstances differed in the least from the outward appearances. He thought it all over carefully now, and there was no play in the entire game that he felt he would have liked to have changed.

Sentiment had no part in the makeup of Anthony Cazeby. Lacking from early childhood the common ties of home affection, and by training and profession a diplomat, he added to a naturally undemonstrative nature the non-committal suavity of official poise. But that was not all. He had never been known to be ill at ease. This was something which gained him a reputation for studious self-control. As a matter of fact it was due to nothing of the sort. No one had ever come fairly at the root of his character except Cazeby père, who once said, in a fit of passion, “You don’t care a brass cent, sir, whether you live and are made President of the Unzited States, or die and are eternally damned!” And that was exactly the point.

Something of all this had passed through Cazeby’s mind, when he was suddenly aroused to an appreciation of his whereabouts by the sound of a voice, to find that the curious instinct of direction which underlies advanced inebriety and profound preoccupation alike, had led him up the avenue du Trocadéro, and across the place, and that he had already advanced some little way along the avenue d’Eylau in the direction of his apartment. The street was dimly lighted, but, just behind him, the windows of a tiny wine-shop gave out a subdued glow, and from within came the sound of a violin. Then Cazeby’s attention came around to the owner of the voice. This was a youngish man of medium stature, in the familiar street dress of a French laborer, jacket and waistcoat of dull blue velveteen, peg-top trousers of heavy corduroy, a crimson knot at his throat, and a dark tam o’shanter pulled low over one ear. As their eyes met, he apparently saw that Cazeby had not heard his first remark, and so repeated it.

“I have need of a drink!”

There was nothing of the beggar in his tone or manner. Both were threatening, rather; and, as soon as he had spoken, he thrust his lower jaw forward, in the fashion common to the thug of any and every nationality when the next move is like to be a blow. But, for once, these manifestations of hostility failed signally of effect. Cazeby was the last person in the world to select as the object of sudden attack, with the idea that panic would make him easy prey. In his present state of mind he went further than preserving his equanimity: he was even faintly amused. It was not that he did not comprehend the other’s purpose, but, to his way of thinking, there was something distinctly humorous in the idea of holding up a man with only sixty centimes to his name, and menacing him with injury, when he himself was on his way to the upper right hand drawer of the marqueterie desk.

“I have need of a drink,” repeated the other, coming a step nearer. “Thou art not deaf, at least?”

“No,” said Cazeby, pleasantly, “no, I am not deaf, and I, too, have need of a drink. Shall we take it together?” And, without waiting for a reply, he turned and stepped through the doorway of the little wineshop. The Frenchman hesitated, shrugged his shoulders with an air of complete bewilderment, and, after an instant also entered the shop and placed himself at the small table where Cazeby was already seated.

“A vitriol for me,” he said.

Cazeby had not passed three years in Paris for nothing. He received this remarkable request with the unconcern of one to whom the slang of the exterior boulevards is sufficiently familiar, and, as the proprietor leaned across the nickled slab of his narrow counter with an air of interrogation, duplicated his companion’s order.

“Deux vitriols!”

The proprietor, vouchsafing the phrase a grin of appreciation, lumbered heavily around to the table, filled two small glasses from a bottle of cheap cognac, and stood awaiting payment, hands on hips.

“Di-ze sous,” he said.

There was no need to search for the exact amount. Cazeby spun his fifty-centime piece upon the marble, added his remaining two sous by way of pourboire, and disposed of the brandy at a gulp.

“Have you also need of a cigarette?” he inquired, politely, tendering the other his case.

For some minutes, as they smoked, the diplomat and the vagabond took stock of each other in silence. In many ways they were singularly alike. There was in both the same irony of lip line, the same fair chiseling of chin and nostril and brow, the same weariness of eye. The difference was one of dress and bearing alone, and, in those first moments of mutual analysis, Cazeby realized that there was about this street-lounger a vague air of the gentleman, a subtle suggestion of good birth and breeding, which even his slouching manner and coarse speech were not wholly able to conceal: and his guest was conscious that in Cazeby he had to deal with no mere society puppet, but with one in whom the limitations of position had never wholly subdued the devil-may-care instincts of the vagabond. The one was a finished model of a man of the world, the other a caricature, but the clay was the same.

“I am also hungry,” said the latter suddenly.

“In that respect,” responded Cazeby, in the same tone of even politeness, “I am, unfortunately, unable to assist you, unless you will accept the hospitality of my apartment. It is but a step, and I am rather an expert on bacon and eggs. Also,” he added, falling into the idiom of the faubourgs, “there is a means there of remedying the dryness of the sponge in one’s throat. My name is Antoine.”

“I am Bibi-la-Raie,” said the other shortly. Then he continued, with instinctive suspicion, “It is a strange fashion thou hast of introducing a type to these gentlemen.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Cazeby, “I do not live over a poste. But whether or not you will come is something for you to decide. It is less trouble to cook eggs for one than for two.”

Bibi-la-Raie reflected briefly. Finally he had recourse to his characteristic shrug.

“After all, what difference?” he said. “As well now as another time. I follow thee!”

The strangely assorted companions entered Cazeby’s apartment as the clock was striking one, and pressure of an electric button, flooding the salon with light, revealed a little tea-table furnished with cigarettes and cigars, decanters of Scotch whiskey and liqueurs, and Venetian goblets of oddly tinted glass. Cazeby shot a swift glance at his guest as this array sprang into view, and was curiously content to observe that he manifested no surprise. Bibi-la-Raie had flung himself into a great leather chair with an air of being entirely at ease.

“Not bad, thy little box,” he observed. “Is it permitted?”

He indicated the table with a nod.

“Assuredly,” said Cazeby. “Do as if you were at home. I shall be but a moment with the supper.”

When he returned from the kitchen, bearing a smoking dish of bacon and eggs, butter, rye bread, and Swiss cheese, Bibi-la-Raie was standing in rapt contemplation before an etching of the “Last Judgment.”

“What a genius, this animal of a Michel Ange!” he said.

“Rather deft at times,” replied Cazeby, arranging the dishes on the larger table.

“Je te crois!” said Bibi, enthusiastically. “Without him — what? Evidently, it was not Léon Treize who built Saint Pierre!”

The eggs had been peculiarly obstinate, as it happened, and a growing irritability had taken possession of Anthony. As they ate in silence, the full force of his tragic position returned to him. Even the unwontedness of his chance encounter with Bibi-la-Raie had not wholly dispelled the cloud that had been gradually settling around him since he emerged from the Automobile Club, and, as they finished the little repast, he turned suddenly upon his guest, in a burst of irritation.

“Who are you?” he said. “And what does all this mean? Was I mistaken, when you first spoke to me, in thinking you a mere voyou? Surely not! You meant to rob me. You speak the argot of the fortifications. Yet here I find you discoursing on Michel Angelo as though you were the conservateur of the Uffizzi! What am I to think?”

Bibi-la-Raie lit another cigarette, blew forth the smoke in a thin, gray wisp, and thrust his thumbs into the arm-holes of his velveteen waistcoat.

“And you” he said, slowly, abandoning the familiar address he had been using, “who are you? No, you were not mistaken in thinking I meant to rob you. Such is my profession. But does a gentleman reply, in ordinary, to the summons of a thief by paying that thief a drink? Does he invite him to his apartment and cook a supper for him? What am I to think?”

There was a brief pause, and then he faced his host squarely.

“Are you absolutely resolved to put an end to it all to-night?” he demanded.

Cazeby made a small sign of bewilderment.

“Ah, mon vieux,” continued the other. “That, you know, is of no use with me. You ask me who I am. For one thing, I am one who has lived too long in touch with desperate men not to know the look in the eyes when the end has come. You think you are going to blow out your brains to-night.”

“Your wits are wandering; that’s all,” said Cazeby, compassionately.

“Oh, far from it!” said Bibi-la-Raie, with a short laugh. “But one does not fondle one’s revolver in the daytime without a good reason, nor does one leave it on top of letters post-marked this morning unless one has been fondling it — quoi?”

Cazeby was at the marqueterie desk in two strides, tugging at the upper right hand drawer. It was locked. He turned about slowly, and, half seating himself on the edge of the desk, surveyed his guest coolly.

“The revolver is in your pocket,” he said.

“No,” answered Bibi, with an air of cheerfulness. “I have one of my own. But the key is.”

“Why?” said Cazeby.

Bibi helped himself to yellow chartreuse, and appeared to reflect.

“I am not sure that I know why, myself,” he said finally. “Perhaps, because you have done me a kindness and I would not like to have you burn your fingers in a moment of absent-mindedness. Perhaps, because we might disagree, and I should not care to take the chance of your shooting first!”

He squinted at the liqueur, swallowed it slowly and with extreme appreciation, smacked his lips, and then, cocking his feet up on Cazeby’s brass club fender, began to smoke again, staring into the dwindling fire. His host watched him in silence, until he should be ready to speak, which he presently began to do, with his cigarette drooping from the corner of his month and moving in time to his words. He had suddenly and curiously become a man of the world — of the grand monde — and his speech had shaken off all trace of slang, and was tinged instead with the faint club sarcasm which one hears in the glass card-room of the Volney or over coffee on the roof of the Automobile. Moreover, it was beautiful French. Not Mounet himself could have done better.

“The only man to whom one should confide personal secrets,” said Bibi-la-Raie, “is he whom one has never seen before and will, as is probable, never see again. I could tell you many things, Monsieur Cazeby, since that is your name, — I have seen your morning’s mail, you know! — but, for the moment, let it suffice to say that the voyou who accosted you this evening is of birth as good as yours — pardon, but probably better! Wein, weib, und gesang — you know the saying. Add cards and the race-course, and you have, complete, the short ladder of five rungs down which I have been successful in climbing. I shall presume to the extent of supposing that you have just accomplished the same descent. One learns much thereby, but more after one has reached the ground. In many ways I am afraid experience has made me cynical, but in one it has taught me optimism. I have found, and I think I shall continue to find, that there is always something worth looking into around the next corner of even the darkest street. The rue des Sablons, for instance. It was very dark to-night, very damp, and very cold. Assuredly, as I turned into the avenue d’Eylau I had no reason to foresee a supper, Russian cigarettes, and chartreuse jaune. And yet, me voilà! Now what most of us lack — what you, in particular, seem to lack, Monsieur Cazeby — is the tenacity needful if one is to get to that next turning.”

“There are streets darker than the rue des Sablons,” put in Anthony, falling in with the other’s whimsical humor, “and that have no turning.”

“You speak from conjecture, not experience,” said Bibi-la-Raie. “You can never have seen one.”

He glanced about the room, with the air of one making a mental inventory.

“First,” he added, “there come the pawn-shop, the exterior boulevards, the somewhat insufficient shelter of the Pont Royal. No, you have not come to the last corner.”

“All that,” said Cazeby, “is simply a matter of philosophy. Each of us has his own idea of what makes life worth the while. When that is no longer procurable, then that is the last corner.”

“For instance?” —

“For instance, my own case. You have analyzed my situation sufficiently well — though when you said I was about to blow out my brains” —

“It was a mere guess,” interrupted Bibi, “founded on circumstantial evidence. Then I thought so. Now I know it.”

“Let us grant you are right,” continued Cazeby, with a smile. “I have my own conception of what I require to make existence tolerable. It includes this apartment, or its equivalent, a horse, two servants, two clubs, and a sufficient income to dress, eat, entertain, and amuse myself in the manner of my class, — an extravagant and unreasonable standard, if you will, but such is my conviction. Now, granted that the moment has come when it is no longer possible for me to have these things, and when there is no prospect of my situation being bettered, I cannot conceive what advantage there can be in continuing to live.”

“I perceive you are a philosopher,” said the other. “How about the religious view?”

Cazeby shrugged his shoulders.

“As to that,” he said, “my religious views are, so far as I know, stored away in the little church which I was forced to attend three times on every Sunday of my boyhood. They did not come out with me on the last occasion, and I have never met them since.”

“Excellent!” said Bibi. “It is the same with me. But I think you are mistaken in your conviction of what makes life worth living. I had my own delusions in the time. But I have had a deal of schooling since then. There are many things as amusing as luxury — even on the exterior boulevards. Of course, actual experience is essential. One never knows what one would do under given conditions.”

He turned suddenly, and looked Cazeby in the eye.

“What, for example, would you do if you were in my place?” he asked.

“As you say, one never knows,” said his host. “I think that, in your place, I should improve the opportunity you find open, and carry out your late and laudable intention of robbing Monsieur Antoine Cazeby. I may be influenced by my knowledge that such a proceeding would not irritate or incommode him in the least, but that is what I think I should do.

“I shall not need these things to-morrow,” he added, indicating his surroundings with a gesture. “You were quite right about the pistol. As to your prospective booty, I regret to say that I spent my last sixty centimes on our cognac, but there is a remarkably fine scarf-pin on the table in my dressing-room.”

“A sapphire, surrounded by black pearls,” put in the other. “You were rather long in cooking those eggs.”

“A sapphire, surrounded by black pearls,” agreed Cazeby. “Yes, upon reflection, I am quite sure that that is what I should do.”

Bibi-la-Raie smiled pleasantly.

“I am glad to find we are of one mind,” he said. “Of course, mine was made up, but it is more agreeable to know that I am causing you no inconvenience. I suppose it is unnecessary to add that resistance will be quite useless. I have the only available revolver, and, moreover, I propose to tie you into this extremely comfortable chair. It is not,” he added, “that I do not trust you, although our acquaintance is, unfortunately, too recent to inspire complete confidence. No, I have my convictions as well as you, Monsieur Cazeby, and one of them, curiously enough, is that, in spite of appearances, I am doing you a kindness in putting it out of your power, for to-night, at least, to do yourself an injury. Who knows? Perhaps, in the morning, you may find that there is something around the next corner, after all. If not, there is no harm done. Your servants come in early?”

“At seven o’clock,” said Anthony, briefly.

“Exactly. And I will leave the key in the drawer.”

Bibi was expeditious. When he had bound Cazeby firmly, and with an art that showed practice, he disappeared into the dressing-room, returning in less than a minute with the sapphire scarf-pin and several other articles of jewelry in his hand.

“I should like to add to these,” he said, going to the book-case, “this little copy of Omar Khayyám. He is a favorite of mine. There is something about his philosophy which seems to accord with our own. But — ‘the bird of time has but a little way to flutter’” — He paused at the door.

“Can I do anything for you before I go?” he inquired politely.

“Be good enough to turn off the light,” said the other. “The button is on the right of the door.”

“Good-night,” said Bibi-la-Raie.

“Good-night, — brother!” said Cazeby.

Then he heard the door of the apartment close softly.

Anthony was awakened from a restless sleep by the sound of its opening. Through the gap between the window draperies the gray light of the winter morning was creeping in. His wrists and ankles were aching from the pressure of the curtain cords with which he had been bound, and he was gratified when, after a brief interval, the salon door was opened in its turn and the invaluable Jules came in, in shirt-sleeves and long white apron, carrying a handful of letters.

That impassive person was probably never nearer to being visibly surprised. For a breath he stopped, and the pupils of his round eyes dilated like those of a cat in a dim light. But his training stood him in good stead, and when he spoke his voice was as innocent of emotion as if he had been announcing dinner.

“Monsieur desires to be untied?”

Left to himself, Cazeby turned his attention to his letters, and from the top of the pile picked up a cablegram. He was still reflecting upon the singular experience of the night, in an attempt to analyze his present emotions. Was he in any whit changed by his enforced reprieve? He was glad to think not. Above all minor faults he abhorred vacillation of purpose. No, his situation and his purpose remained unaltered. But he was conscious, nevertheless, of an unwonted thrill at the thought that, but for the merest chance, it would have been for others to open the envelope he was even now fingering. Jules would already have found him — he wondered, with the shadow of a smile, whether Jules would still have been unsurprised! — and would have brought up the concierge and the police —

Suddenly the cable message jumped at him through his revery as if, at that moment, the words had been instantaneously printed on what was before blank paper, and he realized that it was from his father’s solicitor.

Anthony straightened himself with a long sigh, and, putting aside the curtain, looked out across the mansardes, wet and gleaming under a thin rain. His hand trembled a little on the heavy velvet, and he frowned at it, and, going across to the table, poured himself out a swallow of brandy.

With the glass at his lips he paused, his eyes upon the chair where Bibi-la-Raie had sat and wherein he himself had passed five hours. Then, very ceremoniously, he bowed and dipped his glass toward an imaginary occupant.

“Merci, monsieur!” he said.

title: Zut and Other Parisians/The Next Corner


text:
Page:Peter and Wendy.djvu/327

Rh if he frowns or leers, I frown or leer; if he is a coward or given to contortions, I cringe, or twist my legs until I have to stop writing to undo the knot. I bow with him, eat with him, and gnaw my moustache with him. If the character be a lady with an exquisite laugh, I suddenly terrify you by laughing exquisitely. One reads of the astounding versatility of an actor who is stout and lean on the same evening, but what is he to the novelist who is a dozen persons within the hour? Morally, I fear, we must deteriorate—but this is a subject I may wisely edge away from.

We always spoke to each other in broad Scotch (I think in it still), but now and again she would use a word that was new to me, or I might hear one of her contemporaries use it. Now is my opportunity to angle for its meaning. If I ask, boldly what was that word she used just now, something like "bilbie" or "silvendy"? she blushes, and says she never said anything so common, or hoots, it is some auld-farrant word about which she can tell me nothing. But if in the course of conversation I remark casually, "Did he find bilbie?" or "Was that quite silvendy?" (though the sense of the question is vague to me) she falls into the trap, and the words explain themselves in her replies. Or maybe to-day she sees whither I am leading her, and such is her sensitiveness that she is quite hurt. The humour Rh

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Page:Peter and Wendy.djvu/327


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Page:Peter and Wendy.djvu/328

Rh goes out of her face (to find bilbie in some more silvendy spot), and her reproachful eyes—but now I am on the arm of her chair, and we have made it up. Nevertheless, I shall get no more old-world Scotch out of her this forenoon, she weeds her talk determinedly, and it is as great a falling away as when the mutch gives place to the cap.

I am off for my afternoon walk, and she has promised to bar the door behind me and open it to none. When I return,—well, the door is still barred, but she is looking both furtive and elated. I should say that she is burning to tell me something, but cannot tell it without exposing herself. Has she opened the door, and if so, why? I don't ask, but I watch. It is she who is sly now:

"Have you been in the east room since you came in?" she asks with apparent indifference.

"No; why do you ask?"

"Oh, I just thought you might have looked in."

"Is there anything new there?"

"I dinna say there is, but—but just go and see."

"There can't be anything new if you kept the door barred," I say cleverly.

This crushes her for a moment ; but her eagerness that I should see is greater than her fear. I set off for the east room, and she follows, affecting humility, but with triumph in her eye. How often those little scenes took place! I was never Rh

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Zut and Other Parisians/The Only Son of His Mother

The Only Son of His Mother
In the limited understanding of Pépin dwelt one great Fact, in the shadow of which all else shrank to insignificance, and that Fact was the existence of Comte Victor de Villersexel, the extremely tall and extraordinarily imposing person who was, first of all, Officier de la Légion d’Honneur, second, Membre de l’Académie Française, and, lastly, father to Pépin himself. It must be acknowledged that to the more observing of his limited kinsfolk and extensive acquaintance the clay feet of Pépin’s idol were distinctly in evidence. How he had contrived to attain to the proud eminence which he occupied was, in the earlier days of his publicity, a matter of curious conjecture and not over-plausible explanation. Certainly no inherent merit or ability it was which formed the first step of the stairway he had climbed. In diplomacy the Comte de Villersexel had never bettered his first appointment as second secretary of legation at Belgrade; in literature his achievements were limited to one ponderous work on feudalism, remarkable chiefly for its surpassing futility; and in society his sole claim to consideration lay in his marriage to a Brazilian heiress, who had died within the year, leaving her husband an income of two hundred thousand francs — and Pépin. In all this it was difficult to find a sufficient reason for the crimson button and the green embroidered coat, unless it was that the family of de Villersexel went back to the Crusades. That is not always a prudent thing for a family to do, but the present instance was an exception.

Born to the heritage of a name which his predecessors had made notable, Comte Victor was one of those whose greatness is thrust upon them rather than achieved, one of the bubbles in the ferment of Paris which their very levity brings to the top, to show rainbow tints in the sunlight of publicity. It is probable that no one was more surprised than de Villersexel himself at the honors which fell to his share, but one thing even the most contemptuous had, perforce, to concede. Once secure of his laurels, he wore them with a confidence that was akin to conviction. His reserve was iron-clad, his dignity stupendous. It required considerable time for new acquaintances to probe the secret of his insufficiency. Victor de Villersexel was, as the irreverent young military attaché at the American Embassy once said of him, “a dazzling imitation of the real thing.”

But to Pépin the idol was an idol without flaw. Through what shrewd appreciation of occasional words and chance comments he had contrived to grasp the significance of that speck of scarlet upon the Count’s lapel and that apparently simple phrase, “de l’Académie Française,” which, in formal introductions, was wont to follow his father’s name, must be numbered among childhood’s mysteries. But before he was seven, Pépin had solved these problems for himself, and the results of his reasoning were awestruck admiration and blind allegiance to the will of this wonderful creature who never smiled. His own small individuality was so completely overshadowed by that of his father that in the latter’s presence the child was scarcely noticeable, dressed in his sober blouses, and creeping about the stately rooms of the great apartment in the avenue d’Iéna with an absolutely noiseless step. He was all brown, was Pépin: brown bare legs, and brown hands, very small and slender, brown hair, cropped short and primly parted, and deep brown eyes, eloquent of unspoken and unspeakable things. He was earnest, his tutor said, earnest and willing, but not bright, poor Pépin! He spoke English, to be sure, with a curious accent caught from his Cornish nurse, but that was due not so much to ability as to enforced association. In his French grammar and such simple arithmetic as was required of him he was slow and often stupid. But he was rarely scolded, and never punished. Once, indeed, the Comte had been about to strike him for some trifling fault, but somehow the blow, for which Pépin stood waiting, never fell.

“He is like his mother,” the légionnaire had muttered, as he turned away, “an imbecile — but” —

Pépin, catching the unfinished phrase, grew sick with a great discouragement, mingled with profound pity for the man before him. It must be a dreadful thing for one so famous to be the father of an imbecile! From that day on the child was more inconspicuous than before.

Deliberately affected in the first instance, what was known in society as de Villersexel’s “academic manner” came in course of time to be second nature. Practice made perfect the chill reserve which was originally assumed as a precaution against possible discovery of his vapidity; and as the image of what the academician had been, before his election, grew dimmer in society’s recollection, his impressive solemnity, barely disguised by a veneer of superficial courtesy, did not fail of its effect. He was spoken of as a man in whom much lay below the surface, and his more recent acquaintances coupled their estimate of his character with the proverbial profundity of still waters, and the familiar gloved fist of steel. Others, more observant, smiled at the similes, but did not go to the pains of proving them ill applied. One of the most characteristic things about the Comte de Villersexel was that he inspired neither championship nor antagonism.

With all this, he was consistent, with that curious obstinacy which is sometimes made manifest in the shallowest natures. His rôle, once assumed, was, as we have said, played to perfection and never laid aside. The domestic threshold, which is, for the majority of men, a kind of uncloaking room, saw never an alteration, even of voice or expression, in his pose. The household affairs were regulated with almost military precision, and once a day, at noon, Pépin and his father met in the large salon, — the Comte in his tall satin stock and frock coat, and Pépin fresh from the careful hands of his nurse. They shook hands gravely, and then waited in silence, until the maître d’hôtel announced breakfast, —

“Ces messieurs sont servis!”

What meals they were, to be sure, those déjeuners, solemnly served, and more solemnly eaten, under the rigid observation of three menservants; de Villersexel, with his thin lips, his cold eyes, and his finely pointed gray mustache, barely moving save to raise his fork or break a morsel from his roll, and Pépin, all brown, perched like a mouse on the edge of a great chair, and nibbling at tiny scraps of food with downcast eyes!

At the very end, as the Comte was about to push back his chair, he would invariably raise his glass of champagne and Pépin his, wherein a few drops of red wine turned the Evian to a pale heliotrope, and together they would glance toward the full-length portrait which hung above the mantel.

“Ta mère!” said the Comte.

“Maman!” replied Pépin.

And so they drank the toast of tribute to the dead.

After breakfast, the father would read for an hour to the child, and Pépin, seated on another large chair, would listen, perfectly motionless, striving desperately to understand the long sentences which fell in flawlessly pronounced succession from the Academician’s lips. De Villersexel had a fairly clear recollection of what books had been the companions of his childhood, and these he purchased in the rarest editions, and clothed in the richest bindings, and read to Pépin: only his remembrance did not extend to a very distinct differentiation between seven and fifteen, for it was at the latter age that he read “Télémaque” to himself, and at the former that he read “Télémaque” to his son.

Then would come a second formal hand-shake, and Pépin, pausing an instant at the door to make a slow, stiff bow, would creep off down the long corridor to the nursery, and the Comte turn again to his papers with a consciousness of paternal duty done.

How Pépin contrived to spend the long hours which his daily walk and his short lessons left at his disposal, only Pépin knew. He talked rarely with the servants, — “a thing,” his father told him, “that no gentleman would wish to do;” and other children never entered at the de Villersexel door, “for,” said the Comte, “children sow unfortunate ideas and spread disease.”

But there were compensations. One was the full-length portrait over the chimney-piece in the dining-room. Pépin had no conception of how great was the signature it bore, or of the fabulous sum which it had cost, but he knew it was very beautiful, and, besides, it was his mother, — the sad-eyed, pale dream-mother he had never seen.

The portrait of the Comtesse de Villersexel had been one of the sensations at the Salon of seven years before. The young Brazilian was represented at the moment when the bow left the strings of her violin, and on her lips and in her eyes yet dwelt the spirit of the music she had been playing. A clinging gown of ivory-white silk emphasized rather than hid the lines of her figure, of strangely girlish slenderness, but straight and proud as that of a young empress. In its frailty lay the keynote of the portrait’s charm. It was like a reflection in clear water that a touch might disturb, or a young anemone that a breath might destroy, — not a picture before which people disputed and proffered noisy opinions, but one which imposed silence, like the barely audible note of a distant Angelus. It stood before the memory of its original, as it had been a spirit, finger on lip, at the doorway of a tomb.

This portrait of his mother dominated the life of Pépin like the half-remembered substance of a dream. He had known nothing of her in the life, for the breath of being had passed from her lips to his at the moment of his birth, but with the intuition of childhood, he seemed to know that this was one who would have loved him and whom he would have loved. He spent hours before the picture, silent, spell-bound, gazing into the deep and tender eyes that shone with the same pathetic pleading that lay so eloquently in his own, and the only outbreak of rage which had ever stirred his simple serenity was on one occasion when his nurse had found him thus absorbed, and, receiving no response to her summons, half alarmed and half indignant, reproached him with wasting his time before a stupid picture. Then Pépin had whirled around upon her, his lips compressed, his small brown hands clenched, and a look in his eyes that terrified even the stout and prosaic Cornish-woman out of her accustomed attitude of fat complacency.

“A stupid picture?” he stormed. “But it is my mother, do you hear, my mother! You are a wicked woman, Elizabeth!”

It was when Pépin was nearing his seventh birthday that a wonderful thing happened. The Comte was giving a great reception to the Russian Ambassador, and on an impulse which, perhaps, even he himself could hardly have explained, sent for his son. The child was aroused from sleep, and, but half awake and totally uncomprehending, was submitted by the worthy Elizabeth to a veritable cyclone of washing, combing, and brushing, and finally, clad in spotless duck, was led by the maître d’hôtel down the long corridor to the door of the grand salon, which, at his approach, swung open under the touch of one of the under servants. Pépin, dazed by the radiance of many lights and a great clamor of voices, paused on the threshold, and, with a swift intuition of what was demanded of him, made his slow, stiff bow.

“Le Vicomte de Villersexel,” said the maître d’hôtel in a loud voice at his side, and Pépin, seeing his father beckon to him from the group where he stood, slipped close to him through the crowd, and was surprised to find that the Comte took his hand in his, and bent forward to say in a whisper, —

“You are to hear Pazzini play the violin.

That is why I sent for you. He was your mother’s teacher.”

Like all that had gone before, what followed was to Pépin like a dream — a beautiful dream, never to be forgotten. A great hush had settled upon the brilliant assemblage, for even in Paris there are still things which society will check its chatter to hear, and the tall, gray-bearded man, consulting with the pianist over there, was Pazzini, the great Pazzini, whose services had been more than once commanded by royalty in vain. De Villersexel had drawn Pépin nearer to the piano in the brief interval, and as the opening chords of the introduction were struck, he found himself but a few feet from the famous violinist, his hand still linked in that of his father, his eyes fixed in wonder upon this unknown man who had been his mother’s teacher.

The first low note of the violin fell upon the silence like a faint, far voice, heard across a wide reach of calm water, and, as the marvelous melody swelled into the fullness of its motif, something new and strange stirred in Pépin’s heart, mounted and tightened in his throat, ran tingling to his finger-tips. Through his half parted lips the breath tiptoed in and out, and his deep eyes grew every instant, could he have known it, more like those of the picture that he loved. So he stood entranced, seeing, hearing nothing but Pazzini and Pazzini’s violin, till the sonata drew imperceptibly toward its close. Like the child, the great violinist seemed to be unconscious of all that surrounded him. Slowly, tenderly, he led his music through the last phrases, until he paused before the supreme high sweetness of the final note. How it was he could never have told, but, in that infinitesimal fraction of time, the training of years played him false. He knew that his finger-tip slipped an incalculable atom of space, but it was too late. The bow was on the string, and the imperceptibly flatted note swelled, sank, and died away, unrecognized, he thought, with a throb of thankfulness, by any save his master ear. And then —

“Ah-h!” said Pépin.

The long ripple of applause drowned the child’s whisper, and for an instant the terror in his heart grew still, believing his exclamation unheard. Then it leaped to life again, for Pazzini was looking at him, his bow hovering above the instrument like his mother’s in the picture. In the mysterious solitude of the crowded room the eyes of these two met, each reading the other’s as they had been an open book, and in Pépin’s was the pain of a wounded animal, and in Pazzini’s a great wonder and sorrow, as of one who has hurt without intention, and mutely pleads for pardon.

As the applause ceased, the violinist turned to the Comte, and pointed to Pépin with his bow.

“Who is that child?” he asked.

The thaw in the de Villersexel’s “academic manner” had been but momentary. With the renewed hum of conversation he was himself again, pale, proud, and immovable.

“It is my son, Pépin,” he replied, with stiff courtesy. “How shall I thank you for your playing? It was the essence of perfection, as it has ever been, and ever will be.”

But he could not know, as he turned away with Pépin, that in his heart the violinist said, “Her boy! I understand!”

The miracle of his summons to the salon that night was not, as it appeared, the actual climax of existence, for a new marvel awaited Pépin on the morrow. The doors of the dining-room had barely slid together behind them when the Comte turned to him.

“Yesterday was Christmas,” he said.

Pépin made no reply. In fact, the stupor which descended upon him at this infraction of the usual routine of life effectually deprived him, for the moment, of the power of speech.

“It was Christmas,” repeated the Comte, “and because of that you are invited to a — a — soirée to-day. Do you know the English children on the entresol?”

“I have seen them,” faltered Pépin, “but we have never spoken. You told me” —

“I have changed my mind,” broke in his father. “Monsieur ’Ameelton” — stumbling desperately over the English name — “has asked me to let you visit them this afternoon, and I have said yes to him. Elizabeth will dress you. Now you may go.”

Barely conscious that Pépin had added a timid “Merci, papa!” to his customary bow, de Villersexel turned to his writing-table, as the door closed behind the little Vicomte, and, unlocking a drawer, took therefrom a letter which had come to him that morning, and, burying himself in his arm-chair, proceeded to its careful reperusal. It was in the fine Italian handwriting of Pazzini, and ran as follows:

Prime feature of all the year to the little Hamiltons, on the entresol, was their Christmas tree. It arrived in some unknowable way in the corner of the grand salon on the morning after Christmas, and, from the moment of its advent, the doors were sealed, and only the privileged world of grown-ups went in and out, and could see the splendors within. Inch by inch the hands of the tall clock in the antichambre dragged themselves around successive circles toward the hour of revelation, and, keyed to the snapping point of frenzy, the slender figure of George and the round, squat form of John stood motionless before the inexorable timepiece, awaiting the stroke of four. This suspense was harrowing enough in itself, and only made bearable by recourse to occasional mad caperings up and down the hall, and whoops of mingled ecstasy and exasperation. What was worse was the delay in the arrival of their guests. Later, the latter would be an indispensable part of the festivities: just now they were mere impediments in the path of bliss. Even the grown-ups were more considerate, and came on time. Well they might, since they were granted immediate admission to the enchanted room, and came out with maddening accounts of what was to be seen therein. They sat about the small salon, and talked the stupid things of which they were so fond of talking, — Hamilton, tall, straight, and with an amused twinkle in his eyes, while he watched his wife vainly endeavoring to calm her sons as they foamed and pranced at the sealed doors; Miss Kedgwick, who wrote books, and invited boys to tea; Monsieur de Bercy, who was odd because he spoke no English, but who cut heads out of nuts and apples, and drew droll pictures on scraps of paper; Miss Lys, who played the piano for “Going to Jerusalem;” and Mr. Sedgely, who talked very low in her ear, and said the great trouble with “Going to Jerusalem” was that the players couldn’t go there in good earnest — whatever that might mean.

But would the doors never open?

The children arrived by twos and threes, shook hands limply with their elders, greeted their small hosts with embarrassed ceremony, and then, as if suddenly inoculated with the latter’s madness, commenced to foam and prance in their turn before the unyielding portals. Last of all came Pépin, all brown, who bowed at the door, and then in turn to each of those who spoke to him.

Suddenly, with a shout, the children burst through the opened doorway, and gathered in voluble groups about the glistening miracle which shone like a hundred stars in the gathering twilight, For a half hour all was chaos, and Pépin, standing a little apart, marveled and was still. Dancing figures whirled about him, bearing boxes of soldiers, toy villages, dolls, trumpets, drums. The air was full of the wailing of whistles, the cries of mechanical animals, and the clamor of childish comment.

But to Pépin even the dazzling novelty of his surroundings was as nothing, compared to one object which drew and fixed his attention from the first instant, as the needle is held rigid by the magnetic pole. High up upon the tree, clearly outlined against its background of deep green, and gleaming gorgeously with fresh varnish in the light of the surrounding candles, hung a violin — not one like Monsieur Pazzini’s, large and of a dull brown, but small — a violin for Pépin himself to hold, and new, and bright, and beyond all things beautiful and to be desired!

Then his attention was distracted for a moment. From the time of his entrance the eyes of Miss Lys had followed the dignified and silent little Frenchman, and where Miss Lys went Mr. Sedgely followed, so that now the two were so close that they brushed his elbow, and Pépin, turning with an instinctive “Pardon,” saw that they were watching him curiously. When, with a feeling of restlessness under their scrutiny, he looked once more towards the tree, the violin was gone! An instant later, he saw it in the madly sawing hands of George Hamilton, dancing like a faun down the room, and he was conscious of a great faintness, such as he had known but once before, when he had cut his hand, and the doctor had sewed it, as Elizabeth sewed rips in cloth.

“He is adorable,” said Ethel Lys, “but I have never seen a sadder face. What eyes! — two brown poems.”

“He makes my heart ache,” answered Sedgely, slowly, “and yet I could hardly say why. Ask him what he wants off the tree.”

The girl was on her knees by Pépin before the phrase was fairly finished.

“What didst thou have for Christmas?” she asked, falling unconsciously into that tender second singular which slips so naturally from the lips at sight of a French child.

“I? — but nothing,” replied the little Vicomte, pleased out of his anguish by the sound of his own tongue amid the babel of English phrases.

The girl at his side looked at him with so frank an astonishment that he felt it necessary to explain.

“I have my gifts on the day of the year. Christmas is an English fête, and I am French. So I have nothing.”

“Nothing!” replied Miss Lys blankly, and then, of a sudden, slipped her arm around him, and drew his head close to her own.

“What dost thou see on the tree that thou wouldst like to have?” she asked, eagerly. “What is there, dearest?”

And, at the unwonted tenderness of her question, the floodgates of Pépin’s reserve suddenly gave way. Placing his hands upon the girl’s shoulders, he searched her face with his eyes.

“If there were another violin” — he began, and, faltering, stopped, and turned away to hide the tears that would come, strive as he might to hold them back.

“Did you hear him — and see him?” queried Miss Lys, a minute after, furiously backing Sedgely into a corner by the lapels of his frock coat. “You did — you know you did! And you are still here? Lord! What a man!”

Sedgely shrugged his shoulders with a pretense of utter bewilderment.

“What must I do?” he inquired, blankly.

“Do?” stormed Miss Lys. “Do? Why, scour Paris till you find a violin precisely like that one George is doing his best to saw in half. Here! Clément is at the door with the trois-quarts. Tell him to drive you like mad to the Printemps — to the big place opposite the Grand Hotel — to the Louvre — to the Bon Marché — anywhere — everywhere! But inside of one hour I must have that violin!”

When Sedgely returned, thirty minutes later, violin in hand, Ethel met him at the door.

“They are all at tea,” she said. “We’ll call Pépin out.”

She placed the violin in the hands of the Vicomte without a word, and without a word Pépin took it from her. The instrument slid to his cheek as if impelled by its own desire.

“Canst thou play?” she asked him.

“No,” said Pépin, “and, besides, it is but a toy. I do not want to hear it. But I like to feel it — here.” And he moved his cheek caressingly against the cheap varnish.

“Don’t you think you might” — began Sedgely, and then found himself on the other side of the door, and Miss Lys facing him with an air of hopeless resignation.

“I — act-u-ally — be-lieve,” she said, with an effort at calm, “that you were going to ask him to thank me for it!”

“Why not?” said Sedgely.

“Lord! What a man!” said Miss Lys.

In the dining-room of the de Villersexel apartment the Comte paced slowly to and fro, with bent head, and fingers that locked and unlocked behind his back. In the heavy chair before the fire, Pazzini seemed shrunk to but half his normal size, a mere rack of clothes, two lean white hands, that gripped the dragons’ heads upon the arms of the fauteuil, and a pale stern face that looked into the smouldering embers, and beyond — immeasurably beyond.

“How did it happen?” he asked, after a time.

“Shall I ever know?” broke out de Villersexel irritably. “Pépin had been to a children’s party below there on the entresol, at the English lawyer’s. He and his imbecile of a bonne were entering the ascenseur. She goes from spasm to spasm, so there is no telling. But it seems they had given Pépin a toy — the English and she wished to carry it and he refused. So between them — God knows how! — it slipped from their hands as the ascenseur cleared the gate — and Pépin stooped to catch it — and fell. He died at midnight.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the snapping of the logs in the fireplace and the almost inaudible footfalls of the Comte on the thick carpet. Then —

“He was his mother’s son,” said Pazzini.

“And mine,” replied the other. “The last of the de Villersexel.”

He paused abruptly by a little table, and took up a handful of splintered wood and tangled catgut.

“The toy that killed him,” he added in a low voice, and hurled the fragments over Pazzini’s shoulder into the embers. A thin tongue of flame caught at them as they fell, and broke into a brilliant blaze. Pazzini leaned forward suddenly and peered at the little conflagration.

“A violin,” he said.

“A violin,” echoed the Comte. “Think of dying for a violin!”

Pazzini made no reply. His eyes had met those of the portrait over the chimney — and he was smiling.


text:
Page:Peter and Wendy.djvu/329

Rh told of the new purchase, I was lured into its presence, and then she waited timidly for my start of surprise.

"Do you see it?" she says anxiously, and I see it, and hear it, for this time it is a bran-new wicker chair, of the kind that whisper to themselves for the first six months.

"A going-about body was selling them in a cart," my mother begins, and what followed presents itself to my eyes before she can utter another word. Ten minutes at the least did she stand at the door argybargying with that man. But it would be cruelty to scold a woman so uplifted.

"Fifteen shillings he wanted," she cries, "but what do you think I beat him down to?"

"Seven and sixpence?"

She clasps her hands with delight. "Four shillings, as I'm a living woman!" she crows: never was a woman fonder of a bargain.

I gaze at the purchase with the amazement expected of me, and the chair itself crinkles and shudders to hear what it went for (or is it merely chuckling at her?). "And the man said it cost himself five shillings," my mother continues exultantly. You would have thought her the hardest person had not a knock on the wall summoned us about this time to my sister's side. Though in bed, she has been listening, and this is what she has to say, in a voice that makes my mother very Rh

title: Page:Peter and Wendy.djvu/329


text:
Page:Peter and Wendy.djvu/330

Rh indignant, "You drive a bargain! I 'm thinking ten shillings was nearer what you paid."

"Four shillings to a penny!" says my mother.

"I daresay," says my sister; "but after you paid him the money I heard you in the little bedroom press. What were you doing there?"

My mother winces. "I may have given him a present of an old top-coat," she falters. "He looked ill-happit. But that was after I made the bargain."

"Were there bairns in the cart?"

"There might have been a bit lassie in the cart."

"I thought as much. What did you give her? I heard you in the pantry."

"Four shillings was what I got that chair for," replies my mother firmly. If I don't interfere there will be a coldness between them for at least a minute. "There is blood on your finger," I say to my mother.

"So there is," she says, concealing her hand.

"Blood!" exclaims my sister anxiously, and then with a cry of triumph, "I warrant it's jelly. You gave that lassie one of the jelly-cans!"

The Glasgow waiter brings up tea, and presently my sister is able to rise, and after a sharp fight I am expelled from the kitchen. The last thing I do as maid of all work is to lug upstairs the clothes-basket which has just arrived with the mangling. Rh

title: Page:Peter and Wendy.djvu/330


text: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Fox

title: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Fox


text:
Zut and Other Parisians/The Tuition of Dodo Chapuis

The Tuition of Dodo Chapuis
The situation was best summed up in the epigram of little Sacha Vitzoff, the second secretary at the Russian Embassy, who said that there was room enough in Paris for two and a half millions of people and Gabrielle de Poirier, or for two and a half millions of people and Thaïs de Trémonceau, but that even the place de la Concorde was not sufficiently wide for Gabrielle and Thaïs to pass without treading on each others’ toes.

It was a rivalry of long standing, nourished by innumerable petty jealousies and carefully treasured affronts. Gabrielle was tall and very slender, with a clear, pale complexion, and hair of a curious dark bronze that in certain lights showed a hint of olive green. So Thaïs called her the Asparagus Woman — la Femme Asperge. Thaïs was short and anything but slim, and brown of hair, eyes, and skin. So Gabrielle called her the Mud-Ball — la Boule de Boue. And neither appellation was pleasing to the object thereof.

These two great luminaries of the Parisian demi-monde, blazing crimson with mutual jealousy, followed, for six months of the year, a kind of right-triangular orbit, comprising the restaurant of Armenonville, the race-course of Auteuil, and the Café de Paris, and embracing divers other points of common interest, — the Palais de Glace, of a Sunday afternoon, the tea-room of the Elysée Palace Hotel, the Folies-Marigny, the Salon, and the Horse-Show; and, individually, Gabrielle’s apartment on the avenue Kléber, and Thaïs’s little hôtel on the rue de la Faisanderie. Between the last two, as regards situation, cost, and general equipment, there was not a straw’s weight of difference, save in the estimation of their respective occupants. The apartment had been rented for a term of years, and furnished and decorated, and supplied with four servants, by a Russian millionaire, and the same was true of the hôtel in every, save one, detail, — the de Trémonceau’s millionaire was a Brazilian. For the rest, Gabrielle was of a literary bent, and wrote occasional feuilletons for the Journal, and short stories, staggering with emotion, for the Gil Blas Illustré: something which, in the opinion of Thaïs, was stupid and all there was of the most ignoble. Thaïs herself was a sporadic feature at the Folies-Bergère, where she sang songs of a melody and a propriety equally doubtful, bunching up her silk skirts at the end of the refrain, with her side toward the audience, and winking, with brazen effrontery, at a spot midway between the heads of the bald gentleman in the third row and the wide-eyed little St. Cyrien across the aisle. The which Gabrielle found to be the trade of a camel.

Each had her horses, and her carriage, in which she was whirled three times up and three times down the allée des Acacias each noon of the season, and again at five o’clock, and each spent hours daily in the rue de la Paix, trailing long skirts of tulle and satin before the mirrors of the men-milliners, and pricing strings of pearls in the private offices of servile jewelers. Each was deftly veneered, as it were, with the bearing of the grande dame, except at the moment when she chanced to pass the other, or refer to her in the course of conversation. Then the irrepressible past came suddenly to the fore in a word or a gesture, which babbled of Gabrielle’s early experience in the work-room of the very Paquin she was now patronizing, and of Thaïs’s salad days as assistant to a florist on the grand boulevards.

Honors were even between the two when Dodo Chapuis first came up to pay homage to the queen capital, of which he had been dreaming for four years. He was only nineteen, the son of a great manufacturer of Arles, who had lived severely and frugally, and, dying a widower, left a cool half million of francs to be divided between Dodo and his sister Louise. There seems to have been no trace of doubt in the mind of either as to the respective uses to which their dazzling inheritances should be applied. Louise promptly accepted a young playwright with a record of fourteen rejected revues, to whose suit her father had been most violently opposed; and Dodo, as promptly, took out a letter of credit for fifty thousand francs and departed for Paris on the morning following the funeral.

The story of Dodo’s first six weeks in the capital is the story of full a million of his kind. A pocket filled with gold and a mind emptied of responsibility; youth, health, and craving for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, — these foundations given, the aspect of the structure erected thereupon is inevitable.

Dodo made his début at the Moulin Rouge at eight o’clock on the evening of his first day in Paris. Despite appearances, this did not mean that he was wholly a fool. One must remember that it was the evening of the first day. He walked leagues, it seemed to him, around the crowded promenade, half stifled by an atmosphere composed of equal parts of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and cheap perfumery. He watched a quadrille made up of shrill shrieks, rouge, and an abundance of white lace. He tossed balls into numbered holes in a long board, and won a variety of prizes of pseudo-Japanese make, which he immediately presented to the exponents of the aforesaid quadrille. He squandered a louis in firing a rifle at paper rabbits passing in monotonous succession over three feet of sickly green hillside. He bought a citronade for a girl with blue eyes, and a menthe glaciale for another with brown; and, at the end, rebuffing the proffered services of a guide, who, by reason of his new tan overcoat, and to his intense disgust, addressed him in English, he returned to the Hôtel du Rhin in a state of profound despondency.

But that, as we have said, was on his first evening. On the third, he had engaged a table in advance at Maxim’s, and supped in state on caviar, langouste à l’Américaine, and Ruinart. And with Antoinette Féria. It was not much of an achievement, but it showed progress.

On the following day Dodo went to Auteuil, won twelve francs fifty on a ten-franc bet, and dined at Armenonville. It was here that Suzanne Derval looked cross-eyed at him, fingered her pearls, and remarked that he had beaux yeux. Dodo might be said to be fairly launched.

It would be superfluous to note the further stages of his initiation. They were strictly conventional, and, under the circumstances, it was remarkable that, at the end of six weeks, he had drawn but seven thousand francs on his letter of credit, and still retained his enthusiasms. It is not every one from the provinces for whom Paris reserves her supreme surprise for the forty-third day.

It chanced to be the first evening of the de Trémonceau’s annual engagement at the Folies-Bergère, and for three days the eloquent legend “La Belle Thaïs” had been glaring at the boulevard throngs in huge block letters from the posters on the colonnes Morris. Dodo, meanwhile, had made many friends among men of tastes similar to his own — a feat which is curiously easy of accomplishment in Paris, when one has forty-odd thousand francs and a desire for company. Of these was Sacha Vitzoff, who, on occasion, had five louis, and invariably spent them at once upon his friends, before he should be tempted to put them to a worse use.

So Sacha bought the box, and they sat, five of them, through two hours of biograph, and trained dogs, and Neapolitan ballet, until the liveried attendants thrust cards bearing the number 19 into rococo frames at the side of the proscenium, and the orchestra plunged into Sarasate’s “Zapateado,” and various stout gentlemen wrestled with mechanical devices for supplying opera-glasses, and, conquering, sat back in their seats and grunted. Then the drop rose upon a pale pink and gray libel on Versailles, and La Belle Thaïs flashed out from the wing, with a red silk scarf bound about her head and a toreador’s hat perched on one side. There was no denying it. Despite her rouge, despite her four decades (an eternity in Paris), La Thaïs was very beautiful. Dodo forgot his cigarette, his champagne, and his companions. He followed every swish of her spangled skirts, every click of her castanets, every tap of her pointed shoes, every movement of her gleaming shoulders and her lithe, white arms. This, then, was the reality of his dream, the soul and substance of his vision, the essence of the great city that had drawn him like a magnet from his humdrum bourgeois life in the suburbs of Arles, — the ineffable, eternal Woman, poured like oil upon the smouldering fire of boyish imagination! His slender hands gripped the plush of the box-rail feverishly, his eyes widened and brightened, his lips parted, and his breath came short. Then, suddenly, there was a final clash of tambourines and castanets which brought La Belle Thaïs to a standstill, her head flung back, and one arm high in air!

“She has charm — even now!” said Sacha, emptying his glass.

Three days later, it was known to all the world that concerns itself with such things that Dodo Chapuis was latest in the train of victims to the fascinations of Thaïs de Trémonceau. One cannot pretend to say what she saw in him to divert her attention from richer and maturer men. He was handsome — yes — but the Comte d’Ys was handsomer. He was rich, as such things go, and for the moment. But he had no wit, poor Dodo — and as for money, which, after all, is the only other thing which counts in the demi-monde, what were forty thousand francs to one authorized to draw, ad libitum, upon a Brazilian multi-millionaire? No, evidently, it was one of those strange whims to which the slaves of self-interest are sometimes subject. The de Trémonceau had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, for, certainly, her Brazilian miché would have been ill pleased to know that Dodo Chapuis was riding daily six times up and six times down the allée des Acacias in the victoria of La Belle Thaïs. As it chanced, he was in Buenos Ayres. Still, he might return without warning. He had an ignoble habit of doing that. But when those sufficiently intimate suggested this to Thaïs she only laughed, and sang a snatch from La Belle Hélène: —

“Si par mégarde il se hasarde De rentrer chez lui tout à coup, II est le maître, mais c’est, peut-être, Imprudent et de mauvais goût!”

As for Dodo, he was in Elysium. He was singularly innocent, Dodo, with his smooth russet hair, and his steady gray eyes, and his straight, fine nose, and his sensitive, patrician mouth; and, believe it or not as you will, he cherished the project of marrying Thaïs de Trémonceau! He had fed himself on the poetry of Alfred de Musset, giving doubtful words and phrases his own interpretation, from lack of experience, and, despite the lesson of “Don Paez” and “La Nuit d’Octobre,” he believed in the power of trust to hold another true. Alas, he was hopelessly conventional! There is no one of us poor moths who is content with seeing his fellow singe his wings. No, each must plunge into the radius of consuming heat and learn its peril for himself. All of which is, no doubt, a wise ruling. For if experience could be handed down from father to son, and accepted on its face value, then the child of the third or fourth generation would be a demi-god, or even a full one, and there would be no further attraction in heaven, and no further menace in hell. The which morsel of morality may be allowed to pass, if only for contrast’s sake. We were speaking of Thaïs de Trémonceau.

Dodo’s Elysium lasted longer than such mirages are wont to do. For a full month he basked in the sultry sunshine of the de Trémonceau’s smiles, dined almost nightly in the rue de la Faisanderie, occupied a fauteuil at the Folies while she whisked her spangled skirts and sang “Holà! Holà!” to Sarasate’s music, supped with her afterwards at the Café de Paris or Paillard’s, and paid the addition, and tipped the garçon, and the maître d’hôtel and the chef d’orchestre, as liberally as if he had had a million francs instead of a dwindling twenty thousand. And the delirium might have lasted even longer had it not been for Louise Chapuis.

No one ever knew who told. There is a wireless telegraphy in such cases which defies detection. Suffice it to say that, one morning, the Hôtel de Choiseuil numbered Mademoiselle Chapuis among its guests, and that, as this name was inscribed upon the register, the Fates rang up the curtain on the final act of the brief comedy of the tuition of Dodo Chapuis.

Where, when, and how Louise contrived, in three days of Paris, to strike, full and firm-fingered, the keynote of the situation remained a mystery which none of those concerned was capable of solving. In all the capital there was but one person competent to deal conclusively with the situation. That person was Gabrielle de Poirier, and to Gabrielle de Poirier Louise Chapuis applied.

There could have been no stranger meeting than this between the young Arlésienne, with her blue eyes, and her embarrassed hands, and her gown that all the plage turned to look at, because it was in the fashion of more than yester-year, and the cold, stately leader of the demi-monde, with her air of languid ease, her shimmer of diamonds, and her slow, tired voice, roused to interest for the moment by this singularly sudden and imperative demand upon her good-will and ingenuity.

Louise found Gabrielle half buried among the cushions of a great divan, with a yellow-backed novel perched, tent-like, upon her knee. For once, the demi-mondaine was alone, bored to extinction by the blatant ribaldry of Octave Mirbeau. She had fingered the simply-lettered card of her unknown visitor for a full minute, before bidding her valet-de-pied admit her. A whim, a craving for novelty — who knows what? The Open Sesame had been spoken, and now, in the half-light of late afternoon, her caller stood before her.

“Be seated,” said Gabrielle courteously. “Be seated, Ma — ?”

“— Demoiselle,” replied Louise, complying with the invitation.

There was a brief pause. Each woman studied the other curiously. Then Louise began to speak, at first timidly.

“You think it strange, no doubt, madame, this visit of mine. Let me be quite candid. I come to ask a favor of you — I, who have no right, save the right of one woman to crave assistance from another. I have a brother” —

“Faith of God!” said Gabrielle, lightly, “so have I. A poor sample, if you will!”

Her flippancy seemed suddenly to lend the other fresh courage. She leaned forward eagerly, clasping her gray-gloved hands upon her knee.

“But mine,” she said, “is but a boy. He has come to Paris, seeking to know the world, and, lately, he has become the friend of Mademoiselle Thaïs de Trémonceau.”

“Zut!” put in Gabrielle. “You say well that it is but a boy!”

“Is there need to tell you,” continued Louise, without heeding the sneer, “what this means to me? Is there need to tell you what it means to him?”

“My faith, no!” said Mademoiselle de Poirier. “It is acquainted with me, that story. The end is not beautiful!”

“Tout simplement,” said her visitor, “I have come to Paris to bring him back, to show him the folly of his way. But I alone am powerless. You — you who are more admired, more beautiful, more clever than this Mademoiselle de Trémonceau” — (Oh, Louise!) — “you alone can aid me to rescue him.”

Gabrielle raised her eyebrows slightly, and let her lids droop with an air of unutterable boredom.

“Truly, mademoiselle,” she drawled, “I neither see in what fashion I can assist you, nor why, in any event, I should concern myself with this affair. If your brother has such taste” —

“Oh, madame, I know I have no right,” broke in Louise. “But you, of all women in Paris, alone have the power to win him from her.”

“And when I have won him,” demanded Gabrielle, “what then? Do you think your precious brother will fare better with me than with the de Trémonceau?”

Her calm was broken for a moment by a flash of anger.

“The world is full of fools,” she added. “One more or less is no great matter. I am not a Rescue Society, mademoiselle. Let your brother go his way. His best cure will be effected by the woman herself. When his money is gone, there will be no need to win him from her.”

The sneer sent the blood racing to the other’s cheeks. She had been counting, as she realized with a pang of mortification, upon some Quixotic quality which her reading had taught lay always dormant, even in such a woman as Gabrielle de Poirier, — some innate nobility, ready to spring into activity at the bidding of such an appeal as she had just made. And, too, beneath all her anxiety, she had believed that Thaïs loved her brother, that his peril lay not so much in her making use of him and then flinging him aside, as in the existence of actual affection between him and a woman whom, even as his wife, society would not recognize. This brutal intrusion of money into the discussion, this flippant classification of Dodo with a world full of fools who flung away honor and reputation for a passing fancy, only to be flung away themselves in turn, suddenly seemed to lay clear the whole situation, in all its sordid vulgarity, and with the revelation came a white rage against this woman who was only another of the same kind. She despised herself for having stooped to ask her aid, and a fury of wounded pride blazed in her reply.

“You know yourself well, madame!” she said. “No, surely my brother would fare no better with you, though that was not what I meant to ask. I thought, in my folly, that, perhaps, in the life of such a one as you, there might come moments when you longed to be other than you are, moments when you would like to think that among all the men you have played with, ruined, and spurned, there were one or two who could speak and think of you as men speak and think of honest women, who could say that you had been an ennobling influence in their lives, and whose word would count upon the side of good when you come to answer for the evil you have done. I thought that, not for money’s sake or vanity’s, you might wish to win my brother from this woman, and, when you had won him, teach him how sordid, how wicked, how futile such a life is, and send him back to decency — a better man! I see how mistaken I was in judging you. There is no compassion in you, no nobler instinct than self-interest. Your motives are the same as hers, love of admiration and love of gold, — and, perhaps, less worthy. I cannot say. Hers, at least, I can only suspect: yours I have had from your own lips. Had my brother been more than the poor weak boy he is, had he been brilliant, powerful, or a millionaire, it would never have been necessary for me to ask you to win him from her. No, madame, for you would have done so of your own accord!”

Now, there is such a thing as diplomacy, and there is such a thing as luck, and of the former Louise Chapuis had not an atom. An impulse, made apparently reasonable by pure imagination, led her to seek out Gabrielle, and had she found her, as her fancy had painted her, readily moved by the appeal of honest affection and confidence, she was competent to have won her end. Louise was one of the people who, in foreseeing a dispute, invent the replies to their own questions, and who, if the actual answers accord with those preconceived, will emerge from the ordeal triumphant, but who lack the diplomat’s gift of adapting the line of argument to that of unexpected retort. Confronted with a state of affairs wholly different from that which she had supposed existent, her sole resource was in this outburst of disappointment and reproach, honest, but inutile as the clamor of a baffled baby. So much for diplomacy.

But, as we have said, there is also such a thing as luck. Gabrielle de Poirier was insufferably bored. Her Russian was in Moscow, her recent tips at Auteuil had proved disastrous, her latest feuilleton had been rejected. For six hours she had been buried among the cushions of the divan, clad materially in light pink but mentally in deepest blue, skipping from page to page of a novel that was not amusing, and confronted every ten minutes by the recurrent realization that the next event on her calendar was a dinner at the Café de Paris, which would not come for the eternity of twenty-seven hours! Despite her ungracious reception of Louise, she had been grateful for the diversion, and hardly had she sneered at Dodo’s position before she lit a cigarette, and fell to studying the situation seriously. Louise, pausing, breathless, after her tirade, was surprised to find that she made no reply, looking straight before her with her great eyes half closed, and put down her silence as equivalent to admission of the charges hurled against her. The truth of the matter was, however, that Gabrielle had not heard one word of her visitor’s impassioned denunciation!

There was a long silence, and then the demi-mondaine looked up.

“Where does your brother live?” she asked, touching an electric button at her side, “and what is his first name?”

“At the Hôtel du Rhin,” stammered Louise, “and his name is Do — I should say Charles, — Charles Chapuis. I am at the Hôtel de Choiseuil.”

“Bon!” said the other. “If you will go home, mademoiselle, and keep your own counsel, I think I can promise you that you will shortly have your brother back.”

Louise stepped forward impulsively.

“Oh, madame!” — she began.

But just then the valet-de-pied appeared at the door, and Gabrielle, taking up her novel, flounced back among the cushions.

“Bon jour, mademoiselle,” she said, without looking at Louise. “Achille, la porte! And send Mathilde to me.”

The conference between mistress and maid was brief but eloquent.

“Who,” demanded Gabrielle, “is Dodo Chapuis?”

“The young monsieur of Boule-de-Boue,” responded Mathilde promptly.

“Parfaitement. I needed to refresh my memory. And how long is it since we cabled the last tuyau?”

“Eight weeks, at least, madame — before the coming of Monsieur Chapuis.”

“Bon!” said Gabrielle. “We cable another tip at once.”

(For it may be noted, in passing, that she had one source of income which La Belle Thaïs little suspected!)

“What does Boule-de-Boue do to-night?” she demanded again.

“Dines at home with Monsieur Chapuis,” replied the omniscient Mathilde, “dances at the Fol’ Berg’ at eleven, sups at Paillard’s with Monsieur Chapuis.”

(For it may also be noted, in passing, that the maid of La Belle Thaïs had one source of income which her mistress totally ignored!)

“Très bien!” said Gabrielle. “Now a pen and paper, the inkstand, envelopes, sealing wax, and a telegraph form, and write as I tell thee.”

For ten minutes Mathilde wrote rapidly, and then spread the results of her exertions out before her, in the shape of two notes and a cablegram, and read them aloud triumphantly. The first note was directed to Monsieur Charles Chapuis, at the Hôtel du Rhin, place Vendôme: —

The second note was addressed to Mademoiselle Thaïs de Trémonceau, at 27 bis. rue de la Faisanderie.

And the cablegram was to Señor Miguel Cevasco, Reconquista 21, Buenos-Ayres, République Argentine.

The point of which observation lay in the fact that Dodo confessed to nineteen, and Señor Miguel to fifty-two, and Gabrielle to twenty-six.

It was a bold play, and one foredoomed to failure unless each link in the chain held true. But Mademoiselle de Poirier was no novice, and experience had long since taught her that success is the child of audacity; so, ten minutes later, Achille was speeding, in one cab, toward the place Vendôme, pausing only at the bureau de télégraphe on the corner of the rue Pierre Charron and the avenue Marceau, and Mathilde was speeding in another toward the rue de la Faisanderie: and Gabrielle herself was making life not worth living for Louis, her long-suffering maître-d’hôtel.

The upshot of this triple commotion was that, as the clock on her mantel struck seven, Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Poirier was posing on a chaise-longue in correct imitation of David’s “Madame Récamier,” except for a wonderful black gown, when Achille announced Monsieur Charles Chapuis.

Dodo entered the room in immaculate evening dress, but with a touch of embarrassment in his manner which betrayed his years. He was good to look upon, was Dodo, tall, straight, and slight, with the ruddy olive skin, the firm, square fling of chest and shoulder, the narrowness of waist, and the confident swing of long, slender, but sinewy legs with which one is blessed at nineteen in Bouches-du-Rhône. Gabrielle, taking note of him from under her covert, languid lids, was compelled, for once, to mental candor.

“I comprehend Thaïs,” she said to herself, but to Dodo, “Monsieur, I felicitate you. You have the true spirit of chivalry.”

“My sister” — began Dodo.

“Is, no doubt, at the Hôtel de Choiseuil,” answered Gabrielle, coolly, fanning herself. “In any event she is not here. Oh, she was here — yes; but she had gone — gone before I sent you the note. Be seated, monsieur.”

Dodo selected a chair, dropped into it, and awaited developments in silence. Six weeks before, he would have demanded in a passion the meaning of this subterfuge. But whatever might be said of La Belle Thaïs, one learned diplomacy in her company.

“You are surprised, monsieur!”

“I am infinitely surprised, madame,” he agreed, with charming candor.

“Shall we be frank with each other?” asked Gabrielle, pleasantly.

“I think it is the only way,” said Dodo. “Eh bien, I am infinitely surprised, madame; first, to see my sister’s name in connection with yours at all, and, second, to find that you have been lying to me.”

“She came to ask me to rescue you from the toils of Thaïs de Trémonceau.”

Despite his elaborate self-control, Dodo flushed crimson.

“I think we had best drop the discussion here,” he said, rising. “There can be no possible profit in continuing it. If my sister was here at all” —

“Her card is there on the table,” put in Gabrielle, pointing with her fan.

“Pardon. I should not have permitted myself the insinuation. I accept your statement, and simply say that it was an unwarrantable intrusion on her part. For you, madame, I have only admiration. Your compliance” —

“It was not that,” said Gabrielle, shortly. “I can conceive of nothing less important to me than your sister’s wishes. But I dislike Mademoiselle de Trémonceau.”

“That,” said Dodo, with exaggerated courtesy, “can only be a matter of opinion. I admire Mademoiselle de Trémonceau enormously.”

“The force of admiration is undoubtedly strong,” snapped Gabrielle, “to reconcile you to riding in another man’s carriage, drinking another man’s wine, dawdling with another man’s” —

“Assez!” said Dodo.

Gabrielle shrugged her shoulders.

“Quite right,” she said. “You are old enough to see for yourself. I presume you will not return to her.”

“On the contrary, I shall be with her in fifteen minutes.”

In the distance an electric bell whirred.

“Sooner than that, I think,” smiled Gabrielle, and then La Belle Thaïs was standing at the salon door. She was gowned in scarlet, with a poppy flaring in her hair, and, if she had but lent to her dance at the Folies but half the fury of that entrance, the manager would, no doubt, have tripled her already ample salary. And, at the instant of her appearance, as if by signal, — which indeed it was, — Louis flung wide the opposite door, with a stately “Monsieur et madame sont servis,” and there, gleaming with spotless napery, silver shaded candlesticks, and shimmering cut glass, was the daintiest of tables, set for two!

What Thaïs did and what she said, this is not the time or place to detail. She was not wanting in vocabulary, the de Trémonceau, nor sparing thereof in an emergency. A decade of careful training fell from her like a discarded mantle, and she became in an instant the vulgar-tongued fleuriste of the boulevards. From her chaise-longue Gabrielle smiled calmly, the picture of a new Circe, rejoicing in the success of her spells. And, between the two, Dodo, his hands clenched until the knuckles shone white, turned sick with contempt and loathing. At the end Thaïs flung him an unspeakable taunt, and there was a pause. Then, —

“Do you play the black or the red, monsieur?” asked Gabrielle, sweetly, with a glance at her own gown and another at the de Trémonceau’s.

Dodo let his eyes run slowly, contemptuously, from the topmost ripple of her bronze hair to the point of her satin slipper, with the felicitous inspiration of seeming to take stock of her charms and to be not over-pleased therewith. Then, —

“I continue my game, madame!” he said. “I play the red.”

It was the last, faint cry of youthful chivalry, disillusioned, blotted out, and it was wasted on Thaïs de Trémonceau.

“Tu penses, salaud!” she broke in, with a laugh. “Well, then, thou art well mistaken. Rien ne va plus!”

“He will come back to me!” she cried to her rival, as the door closed behind him.

“Perhaps,” agreed Gabrielle, “but only to leave you again, in a fashion more mortifying for him and more calamitous for you. I sent a cable to Buenos Ayres this afternoon.”

She was deliberately flinging away the aforementioned source of income, for the sake of seeing a certain expression on the face of La Belle Thaïs. But when she saw it, she was well content. For the honors were no longer even.

On the avenue Kléber, Dodo hailed the first cab that passed, and flinging a curt “Hôtel de Choiseuil — au galop!” to the cocher, blotted himself into one corner, and covered his face with his hands.

“It was my first, but it shall be my last confidence in woman,” he said. It was neither strictly original nor strictly true, this, but it showed progress.

For there is such a thing as diplomacy and there is such a thing as luck, and the fact that his sister had not an atom of the former made no difference whatever in the tuition of Dodo Chapuis.