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 a letter to Geoffrey Saint: "Well, on this day of grace, Life began—"

Meanwhile he had only one object, and that was to cultivate the friendship of this pale young man until it led him to the door of the great painter. But how, he wondered, in a sudden panic, does one cultivate this elusive kind of being? Is it enough to offer them meals, or have they strange subterranean tastes that have to be catered to? Does one have to go to dives with them and respond to baleful creatures who come and sit on one's knee? He felt lonely, and a little outclassed. In Boston you would have dinner in a hotel and go to a theatre and feel that the evening had been more or less adequately passed.

The street lights were aglow and the afternoon had perceptibly turned into night. People who had been crowding the terrasse were drifting away into the noisy chaos of busses and tramcars. Across the way clerks and shop girls were streaming into the station to catch suburban trains. Waiters were laying cloths on marble tables in preparation for dinner. The peculiar odor of Paris, a mixture of petrol and sour wine and steamed vegetables, rose with renewed force from the pavements, Though he was by now sufficiently accustomed to his setting to take it pretty largely for granted, Grover was every now and again lifted out of himself by the exotic thrall of Paris. There was something exhilaratingly unreal in being a part of it which lent a touch of adventure to the simplest

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 exploits. He was certainly in no mood for returning to his lonely abode and playing Noémi Janvier records on Mme. Choiseul's victrola,—arias from Samson and Die Walküre, mournfully evocative of enchanted nights forever ended. And in his bedroom the treasured terra cotta bust of Voltaire, with its grin; he wanted to stay out in the streets of Paris and find out once and for all what Voltaire had been grinning about! Surreptitiously he felt in his pockets to ascertain how much money was there.

"I'd like to get into an open carriage and drive straight across the city, to the top of Montmartre," he said. "Will you dine with me?"

"Volontiers, Monsieur!"

The journey was made in silence. It's funny, Grover reflected, to be driving across Paris so sort of intimately with somebody whom, you may find, after you've seen a few of his friends, you'll have a hard job living down. Who may have done time, for all you know to the contrary. Who would be sardonic if he had a little more energy; cynical if he didn't say such truish things, once you've analyzed them. Who would think you a romantic ass if he could see how excited you are by this simple adventure. Who is so bored by the things that exalt you that you wonder what on earth he could be exalted by, if anything. And with his long fingers and fox-like chin and instantaneous registration of every passing phenomenon, how can he be so damned apathetic? Is that the ul-

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 timate effect of Paris? If a little of Paris intoxicates you, perhaps a lot of it drugs you. The cab had arrived at the Place du Tertre.

"If you don't mind my making a suggestion," said Vaudreuil, as Grover led the way to the nearest restaurant, "we might dine across the way, over there in the corner. They give you an excellent château-briand quite cheap, and the vin de la maison is better than most vins bouchés."

Grover acceded with alacrity, grateful for this sign of life. Every Frenchman, he reflected, even the palest, knows where the best food is, and to look at this one you'd never guess that he ate more than two or three times a week. Perhaps, he thought, with a sudden shock of illumination, the poor devil doesn't!

All through dinner, as they talked of Paris and art and the theatre and women, Grover had the impression of being in the presence of something unfathomable. The wine fulfilled its promise,—a pale, rose-gray fluid in thick decanters,—and made for the friendly give and take that had so far been lacking. Even so, at the end of two hours, Grover felt that the "cultivation" of his new acquaintance had not even got a start. At any moment the Frenchman might get up, bid him a courteous farewell, and walk off into the intriguing nothingness from which he had emerged. Grover's resources were exhausted. The very thought of any further effort wearied him. I and Frenchmen, he was thinking, are doomed to stand on opposite sides

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 of a wall, looking over at each other. All I need is about twenty years more experience, or a sense of humor, or something equally vast.

Lost in his own depressing thoughts, Grover was scarcely listening to Vaudreuil's remarks about a new novel, when the name of Jean Cocteau smote his ears and roused him to a recollection of some animated discussions at the house of his French professor in Cambridge.

"Do you know Cocteau?" he asked.

"Very well. Shall we go round and see him?"

Grover could have cried out for relief. An offering at last and a promising one. As casually as possible he agreed that that might be a pleasant way to polish off the evening.

He had visions of being ushered into some recondite apartment on the left bank but was amazed to find himself being introduced to the celebrated young man in the kitchen of a cafe on the rue Caumartin. For a few moments he was not sure which was Cocteau and which was a dancer from the Casino de Paris. But as the hours drew on toward morning he didn't care. He was sitting and drinking gin rickeys in the company of a motley collection of actors, writers, painters, and unguessable creatures, male and female, including two hard-eyed American women from the middle west via Greenwich Village, a dishevelled countess who sniffed cocaine from an enamelled box, and a prize-fighter with polished fingernails. They were all talking

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 at once and all saying things which were difficult to seize on the wing, quite often witty, always sophisticated, sometimes obscene. As he looked about him, beyond the knowing, tired faces, at the bepainted and bescribbled walls, at the flame-like gray-haired woman dancing a tango with Vaudreuil, at the proud American negroes blowing into saxophones, at all the acutely intelligent dregs and caricatures of people who came and went, he caught little glimpses of himself that alternately excited and shocked him. My long lost soul, he reflected, is flitting about somewhere in this room, either in search of a light or an exit.

At three o'clock he arrived at his door in the rue Truffaut, his portfolio still under his arm. It was already the second day of the famous schedule, and already the schedule was shot to pieces. The only item now to be observed was a lunch appointment.

As he got into bed his mind traced a wide circle back to the events of the afternoon, and rested on the life class.

Their smoothness is nice, he was thinking, and their softness and whiteness. But parts of them are quite ugly.

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 morning he awoke later than he expected, as usual, As usual he made shift with a dressing gown and a pair of bedroom slippers and sauntered into what Mme. Choiseul perversely styled the grande pièce. Madame as usual, had postponed her morning tasks and with Mouche upon her lap was heaving and palpitating over the news of a crime committed in the market place the previous evening. An impatient butcher had chopped up his wife with a meat-axe. Resignedly Grover sat down to listen to the details of the victim's ill-starred passion for a rival butcher, but in the middle of the recital the milk on the kitchen stove, as usual, boiled over with a nasty hiss, and Madame, with a stifled scream, departed. That meant that his coffee would be delayed, and the best way to fill the interval would be to play something on the antediluvian piano and try to avoid the three keys that stuck.

As he played, and ultimately as he drank his coffee, his immediate humdrum surroundings floated away and he was back, in imagination, among the strange company of last night, recapturing the aroma of it as one recaptures an arresting tune. Bits of witty talk darted into his recollection, with an echo of the voices and an image of the tired, over-wise glances, and he caught his breath with "holy dread." For these people had fed on honeydew and drunk the milk of paradise. Should one not therefore weave a circle round them thrice!

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 Here, in an ugly little room, surrounded by hideous furniture, presided over by a gossipy, incompetent, good-hearted landlady, he felt if not at home, at least safe. Whatever he did in this dull flat passed unchallenged; if the mood seized him he might go into the kitchen and boil a cabbage, and nobody take it amiss, If he chose to stay in on a rainy day and read, or draw pictures, there was no criticism, uttered or implied. Madame and her two or three other nondescript lodgers accepted him unquestioningly as a sort of harmless embodiment of the Declaration of Independence. And in no other company was this quite the case.

Least of all in the new world on whose threshold he had stood last night,—a world peopled by the fabulous beings, human gargoyles and griffons, about whom his intellectual curiosity had long been hovering. As a youth, in the stacks of the Harvard Library, he had robbed many hours from study to scan the pages of illustrated journals published in London and Paris, and reflected enviously on theslot of those who were privileged to inhale the rarefied air breathed by the gifted, the famous, the picturesque, whose daily bread, at least in the eyes of a student, looked so much like cake. He had never dared hope that any one as commonplace as himself would ever be admitted into an exotic setting. He had supposed that some indefinable but automatically operative rule would see to that. He had come to Paris, on tip-toe, prepared to

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 be thrilled even if allowed to peer through the windows, and already, after a few weeks of Paris, he had spent a night in the virtually intimate midst of a group of people whose names stood for the apex of accomplishment in avocations which held for him the highest allurement.

And the experience was disconcerting. In the innocence of his heart he had supposed that cleverness was the open sesame to the society of "intellectuals." But from his first glimpse of their world he judged that the open sesame was something quite other. Indeed cleverness, per se, was even a grave liability, for cleverness, at least Anglo-Saxon cleverness, was very apt to be allied to priggishness, which was the cardinal demerit in their eyes. Rather, the qualifications for membership in the ranks of exclusive bohemians seemed to be keen intuition allied to a tolerance that would stretch to the condonation of any conceivable sort of moral aberration. To be a member in the best standing you should contribute original views or subtle criticism or a marked talent for listening. An ounce of instinctive knowledge counted for more than a pound of academic information. A college education, for instance, unless carefully lived down, was damning. If you were exceptionally handsome of person, that alone might gain you admission, provided your body was reasonably negotiable. In general a strong taste for the ribald was an advantage, especially if it expressed itself in a pretty talent for making light

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 of sacred things. Intellectual prejudices, or even downright dumbness, would not blackball you, but a moral prejudice or any sign of aesthetic insensibility classed you as a bore. Even if you brought a refreshingly quick wit and a sharp tongue you were under suspicion until it was shown beyond doubt that your senses came in for a commensurate amount of exercise. In other words, to find favor in the eyes of these rare spirits, you must have lived up to the hilt, which meant that you must have given a free rein to a number of urges that Grover Thanet, for one, had held piously in check. Consequently, an hour or two before fulfilling an engagement with the man who had sponsored him in this society, he had an acute problem to face.

If he were to go on satisfying his curiosity about them he must either "live" a bit, or prove clever enough to conceal the purely intellectual quality of his cleverness. Imagination, in the latter case, would have to fill in the lacunae. So far, imagination had served him well, indeed rather too well, but whether under an extreme test it would furnish enough material to serve as foundation for an attitude toward life that the true bohemians attained only as the result of picking life up in handfuls and tactually examining it, he couldn't predict.

He had seen that to know them one must be, in some sense, of them; and to be of them implied commitments in theory, if not in deed, that would, if not

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 completely alter his inherited flavor, at least radically compromise it. He had never before been so pressingly under the necessity of appraising his New England inheritance and deciding whether or not it was really precious to him. For four years he had been scoffing at it; but that was in New England, at close range to all the obviously irksome aspects of it. At the same time, in Boston, even in the rowdiest set he could imagine there, the fact of being the son of the Professor Thanet would give him prestige; in the rue Caumartin somebody would make an awful funny joke of it.

Trying anything once was a popular motto of his contemporaries. But the problem that faced him was this: would it be possible to dip into this pool and come out merely wet? What if one came out slightly dyed, forever? And if one did, what if one grew tired or ashamed of the tint? "You and your moral reactions and your grandmother's ducks!" he could hear Max Bruff scoffing.

A third cup of coffee didn't solve the problem; it merely heightened his nervous restlessness.

"What a horrible man!" exclaimed Madame, and for a moment Grover was startled. Then he realized that she was still thinking of the impassioned butcher, and he went to the kitchen for his shaving water.

There was still time to draw back, he reflected, as he selected his best clothes. If he failed to keep his appointment with Léon Vaudreuil, there would be no

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 reaction on that young man's part but a shrug of the shoulders. It would be comfortable to be French and have shoulders in place of a conscience. On his own part, however, there would be a far-reaching reaction. His trust in himself would wane. For the chances were, he would never forgive himself for losing the opportunity to fill out important gaps in his information. That answered his qualms, and as he finished dressing he knew perfectly well that the doubt as to his going forward had never been more than academic. It would have been better for me, he reflected, if I'd never heard the word "inhibition"; for the more inhibitions you hear about, the more things you have to do to prove you haven't got any.

As he left the house he caught himself sighing at the coming burden of translation,—not the translation of English thoughts into French words, for that he could accomplish with a fair amount of ease and accuracy, but the far more difficult task of translating the very substance of one's thoughts and sensations into the thoughts and sensations of one who has lived, rather than one who has merely been a precocious imaginer, translating them till one's personality stood revealed not as the Harvard faculty had tried to make it, but as a psychoanalyst would see it, all inside out, familiar but astonishing, a humble but terrible and rather exciting thing to witness.

As he stood before the door of an elegant building overlooking the Parc Monceau, another disconcerting

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 thought smote him. What if Vaudreuil himself failed to keep the appointment? It was entirely on the cards that he had more diverting errands, less innocuous company at his disposal. For all Grover knew to the contrary, one encounter with Vaudreuil's friends had proved him, Grover Thanet, all too unsophisticated. True, he had said very little, and tried very hard not to be astonished at anything, but his very caution might have given the impression of aloofness, of private weighing and judging, of self-consciousness, the unpardonable sin. Perhaps Vaudreuil thought him a bore. Well, there was nothing to do but find out, and he pulled the bell.

The grand proportions of the entrance hall, and the thickness of the red carpet on the stairs gave him a shock. How could such an obviously penurious man live in such a luxurious apartment house? A porter directed him to the second floor front, and he rang nervously. An unfriendly old woman came to the door. Yes, M. Vaudreuil lived here, but her eyes conveyed grave doubt as to the likelihood of his wishing to receive anyone, particularly a stranger. It flashed into Grover's mind that she suspected him of coming to collect a debt.

After a short interval devoted to a muffled colloquy which made him feel exceedingly intrusive, he was admitted and shown to the salon: an enormous room with high windows, through which could be seen dapper little tubs of privet, dripping wet from the drizzle

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 that had been falling all morning. For some moments he stood at the window, his own thoughts slightly feverish, looking out into the clean, bleak street and across at the studied pattern of the trees in the Parc Monceau. This was patently another of the tomorrows on which life was foredoomed to take a new spurt, for these unexpected surroundings were charged with some psychic force that both excited him and made him uneasy. Something came at him from the walls and the chairs that held him stock still and gave him the impression that to cough or make any human sound would be catastrophic. Much had happened in this room: there must have been nights when the great dark yellow curtains had been drawn across the windows and the discreet Venetian lanterns which projected from the angle of the floor slantwise toward the ceiling had shed a subtle glow over people whose lives were written in some fascinating cypher. The low couches, the rich hangings, the solidity and delicacy of the lines bespoke a proprietor whose tastes were at once robust and finely corrupt,—moreover a proprietor who was certainly not Léon Vaudreuil. Vaudreuil would fit into the room, a sort of human carved ivory, but he could not by any stretch of the imagination have dominated it, much less conceived it.

All of a sudden Vaudreuil was there. He had emerged through a door behind the sleek black piano, dressed in a frayed silk dressing gown. Grover was thinking of the sickly de Musset, appearing at the door

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 of the room in Venice, his haggard eyes on the watch for signs of betrayal. Vaudreuil's pale hair hung straight over his forehead, and his long fingers were deeply stained with nicotine.

"I'm afraid I disturbed you," said Grover, leaving the windows and coming forward to a chair.

"Not at all," replied Vaudreuil, stretching himself on a couch and reaching for a cigarette case which proved to be empty. He accepted one of Grover's cigarettes and lit it. "I'm sure it's time to be up."

It has been for hours, Grover was thinking, shocked at such laziness yet envying the other his lack of concern. Artistically, he reflected, it's a sin to feel you must be up and doing. Sleep is a pagan blessing, to be accepted whenever it vouchsafes itself. Schedules are unaesthetic.

It was an absurd situation. Grover had nothing to say. Apparently this young man was inarticulate so early in the day, and there was no indication of a move on his part to prepare himself for the lunch to which Grover had invited him. Only Vaudreuil's lack of embarrassment saved the situation,—that and Grover's private sense of being in the right. After all he had come, by appointment, to take his friend out; if the friend sat there like a broken idol, apathetically smoking, let him do so, and make the next move when he was ready.

A door in the rear of the apartment slammed faintly, and brought a sign of life from Vaudreuil.

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 "She has gone to fetch some fresh rolls," he said.

A smell of coffee confirmed this supposition.

The thought of eating in this room, with its dead air and its ghosts, gave Grover a slight feeling of nausea. Vaudreuil's bedroom, he was thinking, would smell of pommades, and not of hot water and soap. And on a table, within easy reach, there would probably be a little white box—

He wondered why the words "New Jersey" had bobbed up in his mind. A few seconds later he traced their source to a monograph on the back of a volume, which he picked up. It was a stoutly bound score of Parsifal, and on the shelves beside it were many other opera scores. Near the piano he saw stacks of music, a rich and enticing variety. Many of the sheets were stamped with the same initials: N. J.

He had got up to look through the music when the hostile old woman came in with coffee and rolls. There was nothing to do but accept the place set for him, though for two pins he would have bowed and walked out of the house forever.

But the presence of the coffee revived his host. They talked of vague things then, the tedium of life, the foolishness of human aims, the unsatisfactory status of civilization. It was most depressing.

If he would only open a window, thought Grover, or go and get dressed.

But Vaudreuil's dilatoriness in dressing was accounted for, an hour later, when the talk had come

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 back to the persons with whom they had foregathered the night before. The hostile servant interrupted them by coming in with a parcel of laundry. The concierge, she declared, was outside, waiting to be paid.

Somebody, Grover recollected, with an inner smile, is always willing to pay his bills; this time I bet it's going to be me.

Vaudreuil had tossed the parcel on a table beside his couch. "Could you lend me some change, mon ami? I don't seem to have any at the moment."

When this rite had been accomplished, and the table cleared, Grover asserted his advantage to the extent of giving his host a hint.

"While you are dressing," he suggested, "I'm going to take the liberty of reading some of your music."

He went to the piano, and rummaged among the sheets. There was a preponderance of songs, many of them difficult, though all the old concert standbys seemed to be included. As he played his way through them, absorbed in the task, he was aware that some indefinable impression was working free in his subconsciousness and floating up toward the brim of recognition. When Vaudreuil came back into the room, clothed and groomed, it burst upon him.

Good God, he exclaimed inwardly, he's done his eyebrows! And at the same moment the N. J. unrolled itself across his mind's eye: Noémi Janvier!

For a long moment his thoughts stood still, then

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 exploded in another inward exclamation: she keeps him!

It was romantic, fantastic, repellent, and highly provocative, all at once, while the disciplined New England part of him calmly said, "Where shall we have lunch?"

"Are you hungry?" asked Vaudreuil in surprise.

"Not at all," said Grover, "But it's something to do." What a horribly American point of view, he reflected, too late.

"As for things to do," said Vaudreuil, going for his hat and stick, "we might walk a little in the park; the sun is coming out." Then, with a sudden impulse, "Shall we go and see Casimir?"

Grover approved the suggestion, but it turned out that Vaudreuil's telephone was out of order. Somebody, Grover suspected, had been willing to pay the telephone bill but just hadn't. As a matter of fact it was Noémi Janvier's bill, and again a romantic thrill shot up his spine.

From a cafe a few streets distant Vaudreuil succeeded in getting a message through to Mme. Casimir, who would be enchanted to see them.

"They live in a very unfashionable quartier, near the Buttes Chaumont," said Vaudreuil. "We can walk there in half an hour, or would you prefer the tramway?"

"Let's walk," said Grover, reflecting that the taxi fare could be better spent later in the day.

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 "Casimir inherited his apartment from his parents," Vaudreuil explained as they approached a drab building in a drab street lined with third rate shops. "His father was an upholsterer with the soul of an upholsterer and the manner of a president of the Senate; Casimir has the soul of a pagan saint and the manner of a wholesale wine merchant. Vous allez voir."

They mounted to the second floor and were received by Mme. Casimir in a large salon which overlooked the court in the rear. Across the court could be seen the high windows of a room which Casimir, many years before, had converted into an atelier.

Mercy, how dreadful! was Grover's first inward exclamation, on surveying the gilded legs of Mme. Casimir's stiff chairs and the large pink and yellow roses in her carpet. Nothing could be less like the salon 'of the wife of a painter who, next to Cézanne, etc., indeed nothing could be more like the salon of the ambitious daughter-in-law of an upholsterer in a small way of business in a poor section of the city. There were photographs in beribboned frames, including one of Mme. Casimir herself as a little girl in her confirmation dress. There were China shepherdesses and plush portières with tassels. There wasn't an object in the room that couldn't have been bought at Dufayel's; not an object that wasn't trying its best to look grand.

Mme. Casimir herself looked far more like the woman who did her own marketing than the woman

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 who treated herself to handsome chauffeurs. Having prepared himself to come into the presence of a rather determined sort of siren, Grover was disconcerted to find a peaceful, stout, tidy, middle-aged, practical woman in a plain calico house dress, her feet shod with felt slippers, her lap heaped with wool from which she was knitting socks for, Grover hoped, her genius of a husband.

"Bonjour, mon Léon," she called out as they entered. "Come and kiss me. It's months since you've been near us. Casimir is quite vexed with you. Give an account of yourself!"

The glitter which Grover noticed in her small black eyes while exchanging polite introductory remarks with her furnished the confirmation of Léon's allusion to her rapacity. Her cordiality, he reflected, is due, first to the fact that I'm brought by Vaudreuil; second to the fact that, being an American, I may have a million dollars in my waistcoat pocket which I'm dying to exchange for the portrait of a calla lily.

"What, all that distance!" she was exclaiming, referring to their walk from the Parc Monceau. "You must be dead. Rosalie!" she called to an invisible but audible maid. "Some wine for these gentlemen!"

Mme. Casimir, Grover reflected, is impressed by the elegance of Vaudreuil's address. It's nothing in her life that a lady keeps him there; she and Noémi, she feels, c'est quasiment, and if a national institution like Noémi, who has the Légion d'Honneur and sings the

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 Marseillaise whenever the nation's in danger can afford to be nice to Léon, it's no more than fitting that she, Clothilde Casimir, wife of another national institution who, alas, hasn't yet got the Légion d'Honneur but who, God willing or God induced, soon will, should at least be particularly civil to him.

"He doesn't know you've come," she said, when 'Rosalie had deposited the tray and departed. Grover had discovered that she had a way of referring to her husband as He,—as though he were of the divinity. "He is working on an important canvas today and I thought it best not to disturb him. If we are lucky he will come up before long. He has had no lunch."

It was appalling to think that they might have to sit in this beastly candy-box of a room till dusk, on the offchance that the fires of genius might burn low. But the droop in Vaudreuil's eyelids was a signal that Madame was talking for publication.

And in point of fact scarcely a half hour had passed when Casimir was seen in the court below, emerging from his studio accompanied by a great overgrown dog to whom he was talking with cheerful animation. His steps were soon heard on the stairway, and Mme. Casimir, after calling out a swift injunction to Rosalie to prepare lunch for four, motioned Grover to another chair.

"He will be tired," she explained in a hushed tone, "and he always prefers that seat. He won't even let me have it repaired for fear they will make the

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 cushions too hard. They say that Victor Hugo, too, was a great child about such matters."

Casimir proved to be a burly man with big blue eyes, a red face, enormous moustaches, and the hands of a butcher. He greeted Vaudreuil with a heartiness that spread through the fussy parlor and included the young American guest, who was, however, spared the kiss that Léon had received and filially returned.

"B'en, c'est épatant!" he bellowed. "Quelle agréable réunion! Plus de travail. On chômera ensemble. Allons, less gosses, un verre de vin rouge. Ça donne du courage. Ça change les idées. Rosalie! Rosalie! On a faim."

Mme. Casimir fetched another glass and placed the bottle before her husband. The gesture, Grover observed, was ceremonious rather than affectionate. She peered through the window at the narrow strip of sky visible above the rooftops. Then in an explanatory tone she told them that the clouds had come back and the light was no longer good.

"Rubbish!" cried Casimir. "There's far too much nonsense talked about the light. A good painter can paint in the dark. When I'm tired of painting I believe in saying so, frankly. Good common energy is at fault far more often than the innocent sun. Is it true?" he asked.

"Perfectly," Vaudreuil acquiesced.

"Is it also true that the men who have the prettiest

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 studios and the biggest windows paint the most rubbishy pictures?"

"Perfectly true."

"Then let's drink to their worldly glory and eternal shame!"

Grover drank and set down his glass, hoping that after this propitious start the talk would revolve about art and artists and divulge precious secrets. But it didn't; it revolved about what Rosalie was preparing for lunch and the specific virtues, charms, and possibilities of the lowly onion. Onion soup, with plenty of grated cheese, it was agreed, was a solution of half the human problems. In the words of Casimir, ça donnait du courage. French servants are good, Grover reflected, because they have sacred rites rather than menial duties to perform.

When the possibilities of the onion were exhausted, and other articles of diet enthusiastically endorsed, the talk passed to America and Americans, and Grover found himself under the wearisome necessity of defending once more the thesis that Americans were not all solely preoccupied with their dollars, their bathtubs, their skyscrapers, and their jazz-bands. His defence was mechanical and dispirited, for he knew from experience that no amount of argument would alter the continental conception of an American.

Why did he die? Why did he die? He heard the old formula in his mind as he surveyed a mutton chop poised on his fork. The formula was trying to express

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 some deep, indefinable disappointment; it was tolling the knell of another illusion—the illusion that genius dwelt on a mountain top, spoke in esoteric phrases, and lived on nectar and ambrosia.

"What if you went down to the cellar and brought up a bottle of the very special Tokay!" Casimir was shouting to his wife. "One bottle! No, two bottles! What do you say to a sip of some very special Tokay, young friend from America? They don't give you that in Chicago, hein!"

Though Grover had never set foot in Chicago, he agreed readily to the truth of the assumption, and was awarded a hearty thump on the back. Ho hit's the rich wot 'as the pleasures, as Max would have said. If Casimir was a fair criterion of genius, he reflected, Max's future was assured.

"But, mon ami," protested Mme. Casimir, "we were saving the Tokay for—"

"Oui, oui, good spouse, for the present moment. Allez! Houp!"

With a tinkle of keys and a glitter in her eye, Mme. Casimir departed for the cellar. A kind Providence, thought Grover, probably lets her get even by bossing the chauffeur within an inch of his life. Where on earth, he wondered, did they keep him? Was he had in periodically to drive Madame through the Bois, did they motor down to some bourgeois estate in the country for week-ends, or was the chauffeur a mere figure of speech on the tongue of the ironic Vaudreuil. Vaud-

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 reuil's irony was a faint overtone which in no way hindered him from chiming in with Casimir. The difference between Anglo-Saxons and Latins, Grover was thinking, is that your Anglo-Saxon tries to pretend that the fine blossoms of his culture grew without the instrumentality of mud and manure, whereas your Frenchman not only acknowledges the fact but delights in it. Both are right and both are wrong. To be a thorough-going specimen of either, an Emerson or a Verlaine, is splendid; but to be on the fence between the two would be a barren fate.

Casimir himself mixed an interminable dressing for a big bowl of salad. Grover was bursting with the food that had been heaped on him, and there was more to come. It was already after four and friends of Mme. Casimir were due for tea.

"Quelle agréable réunion!" exclaimed Casimir once more.

"There are times," his wife put in, "When he won't speak to a soul, and all but drives people out of the house."

"There are times," her husband complacently added, "when people are insupportable, and what's the use of having a house of your own if you can't drive idiots out of it. Let them go to a madhouse. Rosalie! Un bon café! Mais bon! Pas de la boue cuite à l'eau! And if you wish to rejoin your mother in paradise, no chicory. My good spouse," he confided to Grover, "whose qualities cannot be denied, has a few wrong

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 ideas which a lifetime of perseverance on the part of a sorely tried husband has failed to eradicate. One of them is a false sense of economy which tries, by wiles, to insert little doses of chicory into the coffee tin."

"Chicory refreshes the blood," protested Mme. Casimir, and Grover had lived long enough in France to know that phrase by heart.

"Chicory is an abomination," thundered her husband.

I wonder what he'd say, Grover was thinking, if he didn't like the way you were painting a picture.

"Who's coming this afternoon?" Casimir inquired, when Rosalie's coffee had been carefully smelt, sipped, and approved.

It was easy to see that Mme. Casimir had been complacently awaiting this opening. With visible pride and conspicuous self-control she informed him that several persons très-bien were doing them the honor to visit them, including Mme. de Saint-Luc, whose patronage—

"Quoi!" shouted Casimir. "That old camel! Rosalie! Bring the liqueurs to the studio. My wife will stay up here with the debris of the Empire. We other honest Républicans will vanish into a realm where we belong, and where, on pain of immediate dismissal and eternal damnation you will allow no other mortal to penetrate until further notice."

With a great heaving and pushing of the golden chairs, Casimir arose and beckoned Vaudreuil and

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 Grover to follow. The hard glitter had returned to the dark eyes as Mme. Casimir performed the last rites over the devastated table and retired to the corner by the window to resume her knitting.

And now, thought Grover with a sigh of relief, as he followed the other men downstairs and across the cold gray court, now that food is disposed of, perhaps art will have a hearing.

"My wife," chuckled Casimir, as he unlocked the door to his atelier, "is not allowed in this room. She calls me Bluebeard. I let her have her way about everything else; but with my work she shan't interfere. Once my paintings are finished, I give her a free hand. She hatches them out into real estate and government bonds."

They were standing in a studio that had the austerity of a tomb. The only furnishings were a dais, two easels, a couch, a few plain chairs, and some pieces of colored cloth thrown over a table on which reposed three lemons and an egg-plant.

Vaudreuil examined the half-finished canvas on the easel and exclaimed over the subtlety with which the painter had worked out the relationship between the objects,—whatever that might mean. To Grover the painting looked like the effort of an imbecile child. To avoid being drawn into the discussion he mounted

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 the dais and looked through the high windows into a small rear court beyond which stood a garage.

A young man in oily khaki was mending a punctured tire. That, said Grover to himself, is undoubtedly Mme. Casimir's biological escape from reality. He was stocky but trim, with bright wavy hair, sturdy shoulders, a slim waist, and big flexible hands. Entirely understandable, thought Grover, as he meditated upon Mme. Casimir's means of consoling herself for being excluded from the spiritual summits upon which her husband walked. Casimir has his fine creative raptures, and all she has is a hearty old butcher who spends the best part of his life in a room to which she has no key. Why shouldn't she have a human puppy to pet? As for puppies, he reflected, watching the mechanic whistling at his task, they need to be fed and tended. You can't possess youth without paying for it, and probably it all balances out in the end.

Casimir was bringing out more canvasses for Vaudreuil to look at, and Grover returned to his side, out of politeness.

Upon each canvas was a weird and wonderful pattern. There were nebulous flowers pushing up out of vague, unearthly swamps; rubber beasts prowling in the background. In the foreground there were oppressive black and purple mountains, with lonely trees that looked like gigantic cloves, Canvas after canvas was devoted to eggs, in groups of three or four,—suave, sinister eggs, pinkish, bluish, and mauve, like

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 horrid smooth shapes seen in a dream. The pictures were bewildering, and a little terrifying, but as you grew accustomed to them you were conscious of a curious identity which related even the most widely divergent to one another. Grover felt that in the future he would never fail to recognize at sight any picture that Casimir might paint, no matter how far his experimentation might carry him. No standard that one had ever applied to the paintings of other men, ancient or modern, availed one in seeking to judge the present offerings. They obeyed some occult law of their own, but what they sought to express was a complete enigma to Grover.

"Bit by bit I'm getting nearer to my goal," Casimir was saying with earnest complacency, looking less like a butcher now, his head thrown back and his eyes narrowed in judgment before his own handiwork.

"And that goal?" Grover timidly inquired.

"The goal is to eliminate everything, but everything between myself and the object I am painting. My goal is the pure sensory reaction caused by the object."

"Then why not photograph it and be done with it?"

"Because the camera has only one faculty; it has an accurate eye, but no sense of touch, no instincts, no fear, no hunger, no desire."

"And no preconceived idea of the object?"

"That's the camera's greatest merit,—that, and it's indifference to the past and future of the object. Preconceived ideas are the greatest stumbling block of all.

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 They arise in the mind, which is the great distorter of truth. What the artist seeks to do is to approach his object as innocent of knowledge about it as a baby. The camera approaches it innocent, but insensible. The artist, on the contrary, must be highly sensible. A photograph is a one-sided experience; the object alone is undergoing a sensation, and the camera merely recording. A painting is a duet, a struggle, a love affair; the artist's senses are eagerly absorbing a part of the object and vigorously rejecting other parts. That's why a painting is a definition of personality and why no two good paintings of the same object can be alike."

"I don't think I, for one, could ever restrain my mind from whispering to me and telling me what the object meant," said Grover thoughtfully. "I'm afraid, even with hard training, I could never see things as uninterpretatively as a baby."

"So much the worse for your painting," said Casimir, drawing forth another canvas.

But so much the better, reflected Grover resentfully, for my everything else. After all, if cultivation of the mind was a sine qua non of growth (and you were prepared to swear that it was), then the deliberate setting aside of mental processes, even for the sake of pure painting, must be by way of being a degrading occupation, however good sensual exercise it might be. Perhaps I'd better be a philosopher, he concluded sardonically.

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 This train of thought was arrested by the last canvas which Casimir had placed on the easel. Involuntarily Grover gave a little gasp of interest, which brought Casimir's eyes swiftly in his direction.

"What do you think of it?" asked the painter.

"I don't know," replied Grover, slowly, then added with conviction, "All I know is that it's by far the best thing you've shown us."

Vaudreuil looked at him in surprise, and made a protest.

"The little American is right," confirmed Casimir.

Vaudreuil was even more surprised. "To me it doesn't compare with the others. I'd like to know what you see in it."

Grover was at a loss for words. "It's a little crazy," he confessed, "But it's an exceedingly authentic sort of craziness."

Casimir laughed and slapped him again on the back. "You've seen it truly," he said, "without any preconceived ideas about it, which no other person who has looked at it has yet been able to do. I showed it to some of the critics, to test them. They shake their heads and make no comment. You, you're a promising child."

"But," Grover protested, wishing he had a right to this praise, "I couldn't tell you why I approve if my life depended on it."

"You needn't," laughed the painter. "Neither could I. But I know it's good. Not only good, but probably

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 the best picture I'll ever paint. I won't even show it to my wife. She would sell it to a Dutch banker and invest the proceeds in Roumanian oil or Brazilian coffee. It deserves a better fate."

He restored it to its place in the rack and Grover held in his mind a vivid image of it which he tried in vain, now that he was self-conscious about it, to analyze. Apart from the fact that it had stirred him deeply, making him feel half sick and half excited, the painting was meaningless enough. The central object in the composition he could only have described as a cross between a dynamo and a jelly-fish: something that resembled a bulbous piece of machinery floating at the bottom of a cloudy sea, in which grew soft spindley objects like highly magnified moss-flowers, waving about and reaching up toward some unseen, but potent influence, possibly some sun, possibly some purely symbolic goal.

"What I want to know," he finally said, "Is how you can explain that as a pure and simple duet between you and an object, with everything between you and it eliminated."

The painter burst into his butcher's laugh. "Il est malin, le gosse!" he remarked, with a note of fatherliness. "Would you understand it any better if I told you that the painting is a pure and simple duet between me and an object held in remembrance from a dream twenty years old?"

"Not at all," replied Grover. "In fact that compli-

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 cates it horribly, for it implies the intervention of mind."

"Mind intervened between the time of the dream and the time of the painting, but at the moment of painting, mind was banished, and the senses were in full charge."

Don't kid yourself, Grover was vulgarly thinking, but put his thought into politer words: "That's hard to grasp."

"Don't grasp it, mon petit. Instead let's join our cherished Léon, who is bored with us for disagreeing with him, and drop all this useless chatter. Let's see what the slave brought us."

"Cognac and cointreau," Vaudreuil informed him. "Shall I pour it?"

"Some cognac," said Casimir. "Three doubles. And let Rosalie take the cointreau upstairs to the low-lived duchesses. We'll drink to the friendship of the little American who knows nothing about painting!"

In Grover's mind was the echo of a phrase which made him homesick. He saw Sophie Scantleberry's white little face against the Chinese of the inn at Concord. "You've seen so little," she was saying, "yet you see so well." A rather pathetic accomplishment.

"I knew you would get on, you two," said Vaudreuil, and Grover was shocked to find himself disliking Vaudreuil for something veiled and calculating be-

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 neath the remark. "As you know," Léon added, "I don't bring many people to you."

"You are consideration itself," said Casimir: "What exquisite cognac!"

Complaisance itself, rather, Grover was thinking, a young man with a faculty for guessing what will be agreeable to persons from whom he has something or other to gain, and having guessed, supplying it, or taking steps to have it supplied. And he gets paid for just being Léon Vaudreuil, which, as a matter of fact is a quantity as undefinable as a glass of water. He wondered what it would feel like to get paid for being Grover Thanet,—and how much they'd pay!

was with something akin to stage-fright that he returned with Léon late that evening to the rue Caumartin. But after sitting a few moments and steeping in the hot, loose, humming atmosphere he relaxed, and with a sensation of immense relief persuaded himself that he passed muster, even if he didn't belong. Going about Paris with Léon was like having the run of a house which previously one had merely encircled on the quiet, peeking into windows. Inside the house were objects and customs which one might privately

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 decide were spurious, but as long as one was a guest one behaved accordingly. Léon, too, seemed more elastic away from the dominating presence of the Casimirs. The small group of patrons included several acquaintances of the previous night with whom Grover exchanged nods. The gray-haired woman who had danced the tango with Léon came in with a Spanish-looking man and sat at the next table. Léon addressed her as Marchesa.

"You are going chez Floss afterwards?" she asked, and Léon replied that he hadn't been invited.

"That doesn't matter," said the Marchesa, diving into her vanity case. "Neither was I. Come with us and bring your friend."

"Who is Floss?" inquired Grover when the lady had got up to dance with her Spaniard.

"Floss is a habit to which many restless souls are addicted."

"A bad habit?"

"I should say she was an excellent one, in moderation. People are drawn to her big house as tired birds are drawn to the centre of a whirlwind. Shall we look in at her party and see what she's got?"

"She may not like it. It's very late."

"Not for Floss."

In a short time it became evident that half the patrons of the place were on their way to Floss, and Grover soon found himself wedged into a smart car racing up the Champs Elysées past cartloads of carrots

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 and cauliflower on their way to the market. They stopped before an imposing house in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and entered.

Judas! exclaimed Grover to himself, livery and everything! as a species of Cossack relieved him of his hat and coat. He had gathered from stray remarks that Floss was a fabulously rich American married to a Balkan prince of sorts.

He mounted a broad flight of stairs behind Léon and the Marchesa and proceeded to a big room, all soft and rosy and buzzing with laughter. Clever looking wrecks in all sorts of elegant and shabby garb were lolling about on plum colored sofas under peach colored lamps. Rich tapestries lined the walls, and under them stood pretty cabinets filled with ancient treasures. At the piano a popular composer of jazz was playing at haphazard while a famous comédienne from the Palais Royal hung over him and tapped out the rhythms with her fingers. A skinny dark woman with a livid face and great eyes shaded with emerald green stared at him and asked her neighbor in clearly audible tones, "Who is that young man with Janvier's tame rabbit?" Grover couldn't be sure whether she wished to poison or abduct him, but he couldn't pursue the matter for he was being introduced to Floss's prince, a handsome nonentity with a good-natured smile.

"I'm just back from a motor trip in the south," he explained to Léon. "It's a curious thing: I've travelled

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 in Europe since I was a child, yet I still keep meeting the Rhone in unexpected places. . . Here's Flossie," he added in relief as the princess came heaving into view like a ship whose ballast had slightly shifted. She was a jolly creature with pink cheeks and fluffy yellow hair, too yellow. Clad in pale blue tulle, with many pearls, she looked like a gigantic bon-bon.

"You are superb, Madame," said Léon.

"I begin dieting again next week," said Floss. "If I keep on growing I might get ashamed of myself. . . Go pour yourself a drink, honey," she said to Grover, giving him a hospitable shove. "Bring mother a little ruin, too," she added. "We're going to dance pretty soon. Some wonderful coons are coming to play. . . Only I got to let Mamie get a song off her chest first, God help us. Hey, Mamie!"

A tall girl in a soiled mustard-colored frock came slinking toward them in response to the Princess' yell, and Grover was presented to Mamie Mangum, alias Mignon Mangini. All he could say for her face was that unlike Helen of Troy's, Mamie's would never launch a thousand ships. She had eyes which she herself would doubtless have thought of as intense: to Grover they goggled. Her lower lip shot forward at the expense of her chin, and she made horrid little pushing sounds with her nose. Her fingernails were dirty but red and highly polished, and her mouth was twisted into 'an enigmatic smile that she had copied

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 from the pet of the Palais Royal. All wrong, thought Grover.

"Just wait till she springs her new name on the folks in Idaho Falls," laughed Floss.

"Well," Mamie defended herself, "they shouldn't have sprung Mamie nor yet Mangum on me, Try to get an audition with a name like that! . . . What shall I sing?"

"Anything but Carmen," said Floss positively. "I just can't bear it when you're being seductive."

Mamie went to the piano and communed with her accompanist.

"My sister sent her to me," explained Floss, sitting on a sofa and making room for Grover as he returned with glasses and joined the group around her. "Mamie had got herself as far east as Chicago to study for opera. Her voice was contralto but she discovered that all the good roles were written for sopranos, so by all that's logical Mamie started turning herself into a soprano. You'll hear the result in a minute. I've tried insult and everything, but she goes right on, and you can't help having a sporting feeling about it. What I say is, anybody who wants to sing that bad ought to be let."

As Flossie spoke, Mamie commenced to sing, bitterly. To Grover it seemed as though she shifted gears too audibly at the top and bottom of her register. In neutral she wasn't so bad—coasting. I wept in my sleep, she bawled, I dreamed that you were dead.

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 That's tough, thought Grover, and the song grew grimmer. Step on the gas, Mamie, he muttered to himself, a little savagely, for he was oppressed by his middle-west surroundings and was assuring himself that he hadn't come to Paris to be tortured by an immigrant from Idaho Falls who should have stayed there and got rid of her voice in the great open spaces.

Floss had departed to greet another influx, Léon was in the toils of the Marchesa, and Grover was left to roam at will, feeling that he was the only guest who hadn't been snapped up by somebody.

When the dancing began he fared somewhat better. Floss, crossing his path, sent him a quick beaming nod, and he began, against his Bostonian prejudices, to like her. "I ought to been born in the days of Rubens," he heard her remark to the Marchesa's Spaniard, who replied with affected ardor, his eyes on Floss's pearls, that he would love to paint her as she was. "Go on, man!" mocked the princess, "you haven't got enough paint."

For his sins Grover had to dance with Miss Mangum, who drooped and swayed and leaned upon him and kept breaking into bad French. Her gestures, like her garments, were borrowed, and not one of them fitted her. The worst of it was, no one came to his rescue, and he had Mamie on his hands for an hour. When he brought her some champagne and sandwiches he found her powdering her long nose with a powder that looked like pollen. That operation achieved, she

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 continued to peer into the mirror, humming an aria from Thaïs: Dis-moi que je suis belle, et que je serai belle, éternellement—éternellement—which no mirror outside a Coney Island sideshow could honestly do. Meanwhile he had to stand there and hold her plate and glass.

On the pretext of seeking food for himself, he took leave of the princess and fled.

"Come again soon, honey," Floss had called out after him. "Just love to see you."

If Americans would only refrain from Americanizing everything they touch, Grover philosophized next day. You no sooner ran down a scent in Paris than it brought you out on a path leading straight to Chicago.

The last few days had not only tired him but estranged him from himself. He needed time to sort and range a mass of impressions. He had parted from Vaudreuil on a vague understanding that they would "see each other soon." The schedule had fallen into the discard and he wasn't sure whether it would be better to draw up a revised version or let circumstances work out a routine for him. He thought of returning to the life class in the rue de la Grande Chaumière and enrolling honorably as a member. But as the vision of all those sophisticated students flashed before him, himself standing ignorant, amateurish, and forlorn in

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 their midst, he shrank from it. Better to seek out Casimir quietly and take counsel of him. The distance from his present self to the Grover Thanet who would be deferred to at international art shows seemed almost farther than he had courage to go.

His way of life during these last few days had also depleted his money. Bohemians, he had discovered, will drink up everything you set before them.

A new mood settled on him, a mood as gray and still and sombre as the October skies over the smutty roofs of his humble neighborhood. As the trees in the court had been shedding outgrown scraps of foliage, so had he been dropping his boyish extravagances; and just as the creamy walls across the court were less bewilderingly lacey, so his mental shadows bore witness to the simplification of his daily habits. On the other side of the house, when the laundress in the rue Truffaut began to appear in a brownish-red cloth blouse which had a suggestion of winter about it, he deserted the balcony to read indoors, On cold days he would build a fire in the grate of the grande pièce which was anything but grande and stretch before it with Mouche and a book. Sometimes Madame would come and sit near him to trim hats.

Hats were a rite with Mme. Choiseul. Three or four times a year she would sally forth to the Galeries Lafayette, spend an afternoon in the millinery department, and order a wide assortment of trimmings and a dozen bare hats on approval. For a week there

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 would be a continuous orgy of tryings on and consultations with Grover, M. Courso her avoué, the maid (if any, and usually she had just been discharged for reasons which were beyond Grover's comprehension), and the postman,—never with the concierge's wife, for the latter was ex-officio Madame's bitterest enemy. The concierge's wife said horrid things about Mouche.

At the end of the week the obliging delivery man from the Galeries Lafayette would call, and Madame, in a frenzy of indecision, would send back one third of the equipment and retain the balance on extended approval. Ten days later, when the delivery man again made his rounds she would keep and pay for one of the remaining two thirds and proceed, as soon as he had left, to regret her choice and mourn the rejected models.

And as she mourned she would trim, her only artistic principle being a wayward housewifely instinct to use up all her material. But as soon as the last gold rose and the last cluster of grapes had been made fast, their destiny was fulfilled, for Madame never wore a hat from January to December. Her hats were the concrete emblems of her perennial illusions. When she tried them on they settled down over bright visions of holiday excursions to Fontainebleau and Paris-Plage, visits to the Panthéon and Magic City and Longchamps, but for one reason or another "that never arranged itself," and of course her jiggings and joggings to market and to the cinema were negotiated

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 in bare head. Accordingly every new hat found its way to a shelf in her wardrobe amongst the accumulated headgear of seasons.

And Grover would mechanically urge her to make a trip to the country and "change her ideas," feeling the while that his own ideas were jelling too hard, that the novelty of being a gentleman at large in a free universe, of being a young New Englander abroad for a purpose and not for a holiday, had worn somewhat thin. Once or twice it struck him as odd not to be preparing for a return to college. With the sense of freedom he had acquired was mingled a tinge of nostalgia for the red brick and the elms of Cambridge, the knobby pavements of Mount Auburn Street, the Japanese ivy at the windows of his dormitory, the smell of roasting chestnuts in front of the bookstore, the snooty, affectionate morning greetings in the street from Eric Peperell and other sleepy classmates, the letters from Rhoda and his mother—especially those.

Often now, after days of wandering through the byways of Paris, he caught himself hurrying back to the rue Truffaut, only to stop short with the desolating realization that in his mind he had been composing a letter to his mother, the only person who had ever completely responded to his whimsical enthusiasms about nothing in particular. What a blessed relief it had been in the old days to pour out one's imaginary woes and imaginary exaltations in chaotic letters home. What pain it caused, now, to be obliged to keep one's

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 woes and exaltations to oneself. Every man, he reflected, needs a human blotter; that's why most men marry.

"If you but knew your Freud," Rhoda had once said to him, "you'd realize what an incurable mother-complex you've got."

He had retorted that she had an incurable son one, but privately he was inclined to think Rhoda right, for he was forever unconsciously drawing the maternal out of women.

It hurt him now to think how casually he had accepted the priceless care he had received at his mother's hands. Episodes long since obliterated in memory kept coming back to accuse him of remissness. He recalled one birthday when he had been naughtily ungracious at not receiving the present he had set his heart on: an English bicycle with fancy hand brakes which was beyond his mother's restricted means. He had been unfeelingly offhand about the leather music roll she had chosen for him, had even criticized the size of the monogram stamped on the flap. The following morning, in front of the cyclist shop on the main street of Aldergrove, he had come upon his mother in earnest conversation with the proprietor, asking absurdly feminine questions about the mechanism of the coveted bicycle. He had hurried her away, now stubbornly adamant against the purchase, humiliated and irritated at her public display of ignorance of gears and ball-bearings. Now, thirteen years too

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 late, he saw the look of desperate courage in her tired little face as she ignored her own hurt and thought only of how she might contrive to give him the extra luxury. Thirteen years too late it wrung his heart and brought tears to his eyes. And now, with only the memory of her unfailing support, he had his own life to construct, upon all too uncertain foundations.

As he went about the altered city,—especially altered for him since the exodus of thousands of trying compatriots,—he caught occasional glimpses of the earnestness that lay beneath the much-advertized frivolity of Paris. He also caught occasional glimpses of the man that dwelt behind his own mask, a man far too serious for the meagre shadow he seemed destined to cast. Each day he divested himself of some prejudice or illusion. Shorn lamb! he half angrily commiserated with himself one afternoon, and on a sudden impulse turned toward the house in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne.

For once it was empty, and when his name was sent up a joyful yell summoned him to a colossal bedroom, where he found the princess in a satin peignoir spraying herself with perfume.

"Just making myself smell presentable," she said, reaching out her plump arm. "How you been honey? Haven't seen you for a dog's age. . . Blue?"

"A little."

"Tell Flossie. How do I smell?"

"Like a bloody drug-store," said Grover.

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 The telephone rang, and the princess' arm darted into a little silk and brocade kennel. Despite her many years of residence in the country, she spoke the weirdest pig-latin French Grover had yet heard. Her complete lack of embarrassment about it was refreshing. "Non," she was screaming into the mouthpiece, "vous viens voir moi first."

"Miaow!" she said, when that was over. "Last year she lands here broke and begs me to put her up for a week. At the end of three days she's so drunk she tries to climb the wall and get aboard a ship in a picture hanging over the bed."

With a vigorous gesture Floss lighted herself a cigarette and gave her hair a final fluffing, while the cold afternoon sunlight picked out the facets in her diamond bracelets. On a sudden impulse she reached for the empty cigarette case on the dressing table and handed it to Grover.

"You can have that, honey—and for no reason at all."

"For the love of Mike!" he cried. "Are you vamping me?"

To his surprise Floss looked shocked.

"It's very sweet of you," he quickly corrected himself, "but why should I have it?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake, if it's going to be a moral issue, don't take it," cried Floss. "I just thought you'd: like one. It's for your blues," she added, going into the next room to change her peignoir for an out—of

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 doors dress. "I wish I didn't have so darn much figure," he heard her wail.

On her return she proposed going out for tea. "I feel cooped up," she said. "Besides I want to stop at a couple of shops, and I always get stuck for the French for words like hind-side-to. The French don't seem to use 'em. Mamie Mangum tried interpreting for me the other day but got herself all bawled up. Her French is mostly all accent and arm-play. Don't you adore Mamie? She's such a fool. To see her walking around like a mannequin with all the style of a damp handkerchief! Chuck me that hat, honey."

"You're such a comfort, Floss," sighed Grover as they walked downstairs. "For one thing you don't ask questions."

Cause I know all the answers. Life's a gyp."

He looked at her quickly, as he held open the door. She pulled her furs around her neck and got into the car, still beaming.

"Why, aren't you happy?"

"Sure I am, but only because I've quit sitting at the window watching for Happiness to come up and call on me. High-hat Fate before she high-hats you, and you're safe."

Grover sat back meditating. Sitting at Floss's side he was reminded of the spring afternoons when he drove with Sophie. How palely orchidaceous Sophie's image seemed when compared with the abundant and luxuriant princess from Chicago, and how chastened,

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 seasoned, and resigned the present Grover Thanet seemed when compared with that impossibly amative schoolboy of last May. Have I matured, he wondered, or just got tired?

"Did I tell you I'm having a great big portrait of myself painted?" Floss broke in on his revery. "I'm going to send it to my Christian sister. Not that she loves me so dearly, but she wants my picture on the dining-room wall just the same. So she can say, 'Yes, that's my sister, Princess Grushki'—it sounds so grand. My folks all thought I married poor Paul for his title, but I didn't. I married him for his moustache. And one bright day he went and cut it off because a thin girl at the Marigny didn't like it—it tickled her, I guess—that's how life is. Never mind, I get a lot of fun out of it, thanks to my old man who made the most bathtubs of anybody in the world. When poor Pa died, Etta wore enough crepe to drape the town hall, and under it all she was thinking, Now there isn't anybody left in the family who'll try to eat in his . Each spring she comes over here to pick a quarrel with me, but I refuse to fight with my only-begotten sister. Very cordial and affectionate, you know, and give her the best rooms and all, then fill the rest of the house with all the lousey artists I know and let 'em raise hell. You'd be surprised how soon your sister leaves for Nice, and that's over for another year."

"The one thing about you I can't make out," he

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 remarked, "is your extreme catholicity of taste in respect of people. You know more lost souls than any nice person I ever met."

Floss burst out laughing. "To the pure all things' are pure. I'm getting revenge."

"On what, for goodness' sake?"

"On all the Elsie books they made me read," she parried.

Grover was silent. So even Floss's militant bohemianism masked a principle. Scratch an American, even the most scatter-brained, and you'd find a streak of idealism, sometimes straight, sometimes grotesquely bent out of shape. Privately he wondered whether Floss were not also taking revenge on a layer of society that had, to use her own term, high-hatted her. That would account for her none too deferential treatment of the Marchesa, who, whatever her moeurs might be, was solidly enough entrenched in the Almanach de Gotha. He was sorry for Floss, as he was sorry sooner or later for all the people he really liked. He thought of certain old ladies in Massachusetts who would run squawking from Floss's presence, yet Floss's character was proof against acids that would reduce them to a white ash.

Is it merely because he's French, Grover wondered, or is it because the friends you make when you're grown-up never come so close to you as the friends

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 of your youth? Whatever the reason, Léon Vaudreuil remained a curiously negative quantity, though at moments, avid for the kind of information Léon could supply, he still repaired to the cafes where he could be found. There had been occasions when he had gone on with Léon's friends to participate in routs which lasted well into the following day, but in every case his curiosity rather than his paganism had carried him through. The chief satisfaction that he brought away, along with the clinging scent used by the particular nymph that had fallen to him, was the knowledge that there were licenses he could allow himself with impunity. He was now convinced that there was no absolute right or wrong in nature. He was even ready to argue that two and two do not necessarily make four, for in the light of modern chemical science it appeared that if you added two and two hard enough some of the mass of the two twos went off into light, heat, or other forms of energy, making the total one and a fraction. In short, he had found out that every man must find reasons to support the conduct into which his strongest instincts lead him, and the sooner one perfected oneself in the art of casuistry the better for one's peace of mind. Of course if your strongest instincts led you to murder your grandmother, the State had to suppress you; but usually they didn't. Like the Princess Grushki, née Florence Mickle of Winnetka, Ill., he had devised the motto: Live and let live,—but the word "live" bore a more

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 active and concrete connotation for him now than it had in the classic shades of Harvard, where talk had been rife and living a mere concept.

The Christmas ordeal was over: alone in the rue Truffaut he had thought of the happy family in Aldergrove, sitting on the library floor in a litter of red ribbon and tissue paper and tinsel and chocolates and oranges. For the first time in many years the Marples had not been at the window watching for him and his mother and the black Artelia to cross the snowy path from the little house on the cliff.

The New Year was approaching, and he had drawn up a brand new schedule to take effect on the first of January. The first item was a call on the Casimirs, of whom he had seen much less than he might have done, in view of their consistent cordiality. Casimir still thought of him as an inspired critic; and his "good spouse" still seemed to suspect the lurking presence of a million dollar bill. It's my grand manner, thought Grover.

His proposed visit had a double purpose: first, it would be a New Year's compliment; second, it would be a fitting occasion on which to offer for the painter's criticism a selection of his drawings.

Taking the precaution to set out early in the afternoon, that he might arrive in advance of other visitors, he had the good luck to find Casimir alone.

"My wife went out to distribute foolish gifts among her foolish friends," he explained. "Your flowers will

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 enchant her. How kind of you to remember a pair of ugly old bores! Rosalie!"

As Casimir talked, chiefly of the cold weather and the painful effects of absorbing too much acid into the human body, Grover meditated on the fate of an aspiring poet he had met through Léon Vaudreuil. Seeking encouragement in his chosen profession, the young man, who was employed by day in the office of an insurance company, had with great trepidation brought a sheaf of his tender verses to a cynical member of the Academie. The older man, after reading them placidly, had handed them back with the remark: "By all means, go on writing verses, mon petit—mais, si vous m'en croyez, restez dans les assurances."

Would Casimir advise him to remain in—but then there was nothing for him to remain in, except doubt, and that was intolerable.

"I took the great liberty," he finally confessed, "to bring a few of my drawings. Could I show them to you?"

Casimir clapped him on the shoulder and set down his glass, "Mais, je vous en prie!" he exclaimed, waving his thick fingers toward the portfolio which Grover was nervously fingering.

"If claim nothing for them," said Grover. "No doubt they are extremely ordinary. But one can't be certain oneself, n'est-ce pas?"

"Faites voir! Faites voir!"

It was an odd assortment. There was one sketch

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 of a tumbledown boathouse at Aldergrove, a portrait of Geoffrey Saint in charcoal done four years since, a half finished sketch of the naked girl in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, several studies of the rooftops in the rue Truffaut, a water color of a wineshop at Chartres (he had meant to do the cathedral!), and other odds and ends.

It was a strain to watch Casimir's noncommital face as he turned from sketch to sketch, and Grover was positively shocked to find which two the master had set aside for closer inspection. The first was a whimsical drawing he had once made from the window of his rooms at Harvard: the brick campanile of a newly erected Roman Catholic church, with a row of saucy birds singing like mad and thereby attempting to drown the pious sound of the bells. The second was the lazy series of sketches of the overfed cat at Suresnes which he had absent-mindedly drawn on the afternoon when his Muse had proved so recalcitrant.

The sketch of the birds and the belfry he had almost decided not to include because of its peculiar personal quality, a quality which he feared would seem trivial to other eyes. The tower had an aggressive slant, as though it were bigotry personified, and the birds were not Massachusetts birds at all, but a flock of winged little Thanets, scolding God in the terms of a Harvard senior, Yet the drawing was more than a caricature: the clouds and the branches, though inadequately ren-

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 dered, had an energy and sweep worthy of a more ambitious composition. The longer Casimir regarded it, the more Grover realized, to his pleasure and surprise, that its very amateurishness was in its favor.

"This one shows originality," Casimir finally pronounced. "You have an appealing talent. Not a great talent—a nice little one. These others," and he waved his hand over the discarded heap, "are unconsciously imitative and mean nothing in particular. Your cats are original, too. Excessively feline, they are at the same time very human. You have drawn them not as a cat would see them, but as a man, and a very special man, would see them. You project your own nature into the object you are depicting, and that is well. But you are also capriciously reticent; you exercise a reserve which is no doubt a quality that makes for the strength of your race, but prohibits free expression. A true artist holds nothing back; he invests all and takes all. Half measures make for an attitude, but not for creation. Attitudes are of interest; they are not of importance."

A little chagrined, a little excited, Grover was thinking of de Musset and the pelican. For a moment the old enthusiasm flared up in him. At least Casimir had dug out of the rubbish heap two sketches which were not banal. And Casimir was a howling genius; M. Ripert would no doubt have found more. That indicated that he, Grover Thanet, had it in him to be a painter sui generis. Yet, alas, wasn't the meanest car-

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 toonist in the cheapest Sunday supplement sui generis? And when he compared his own faint hopes with the sublime engrossment of a Casimir, his own dicky birds with the overpowering deep-sea dynamos of the man of genius, his flame went down and his body grew cold.

"Show me the next sketches you do," invited Casimir, with sincere fatherliness, "I will tell you truly if I see progress."

To Grover these words had the ring of a knell, but the gratitude he professed was genuine enough. However belittling the verdict might be, Casimir had at any rate thrown light on his path and distinguished his strength from his weakness. Henceforth it should be easier to see honestly, whether or not he should prove able to paint what he saw. If I could only make as pretty color combinations on my canvas, he morbidly reflected, as I can make on my !

Before the sketches were restored to the portfolio, footsteps were heard and Casimir went to the door.

An incredible family of four trooped in, to the accompaniment of festive salvos on the part of Casimir.

"Quelle agréeable réunion!" he was shouting, in between crackling ceremonial kisses.

I'd be more at home in Alaska, thought Grover, marvelling at the fate that had plunged him into the heart of such queer goings on.

He was presented to Mme. Racicot, a dowdy woman who looked like a secretary bird. Her eyes were popping and sharp; so, Grover suspected, was her tongue.

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 Her husband looked like a bad copy of an inferior portrait of Christ. His face was the color of plasticene, and it was framed with a dank, straggling beard. He wore brown spectacles and baggy black clothes and gave the impression that life in him was sustained only by recourse to lime-water and underdone spaghetti. Each Racicot held a child by the hand: a clay-faced boy of fourteen with absorbent cotton in his ear and a bridge across his teeth, and a little girl who clutched a tiny red leather handbag and kept curtseying in a panic. She also kept dancing from one leg to the other and had to be removed in the interests of hygiene.

After voluble compliments and countless amenities, the Racicots sank exhausted into various golden receptacles, whereupon there began a process of declining a number of beverages. M. Racicot, it appeared, drank no alcool, ate no meat, and abjured tobacco. His wife, like the wife of Jack Spratt, had a complementary list of abstentions, with a physiological justification for each, and the hearty, hospitable Casimir was being reduced to despair when the youngest Racicot, now at ease, was overheard to say that she would like some grenadine.

"Ah!" cried their host in relief, and shouted for Rosalie.

Rosalie was engaged in admitting two more visitors, whom Grover had once before encountered in this house: two nipped-in-the-bud souls whose harmless curiosities ran along the roomy grooves set for them

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 in the Mercure de France,—men who thought in terms of vin ordinaire but expressed themselves in the champagne phraseology of Jules Lemaître. One was M. Espil, the editor of a violently Roman Catholic weekly. His features had sagged and were threatening to cave in, and his infantile intensity made Grover feel that the salvation of poor Espil himself rather than that of the nation depended upon the success of his projects for restoring the supremacy of the Church.

The other was Pol Saulieu who sold or tasted coffee for a living but who spent most of his time knight-erring and writing incomprehensible poetry. Before Racicot had taken to composing songs without words,—esoteric songs that a few venturesome concert artists had hummed in public to the vast discomfiture of the musical world,—Saulieu had collaborated with him on a number of lyrics about faded roses and langorous ecstasies. Pol was hirstite and oily; his fingers resembled the necks of gigantic clams; his waistcoat was never too well buttoned; and he had loud convictions about God,—had even located the habitat of Deity. As nearly as Grover could grasp, God dwelt in the small of one's back, and expressed Himself in the form of reflex actions.

Casimir had the satisfaction of pouring strong drink for this pair, and Grover took his leave as four glasses of the horrid pink syrup were being set before the polite and abstemious Racicots.

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 Quelle anything but agréeable réunion! he was muttering to himself on the stairs.

And M. Racicot, that anaemic little squirt crumpled up in a golden fauteuil from Dufayels with a shawl over his shoulders, was the great man whom Max Bruff had been raving about for two years, the only musician in Europe, so Max averred, who had caught and expressed the spirit of the new age, a genius and a prophet, mothered by Debussy, sired by the later Scriabin, but with a dynamic new idiom of his own—something to do with a revolutionary use of intervals and a new conception of tone. One cold afternoon Grover had listened for hours to Max's renditions of Racicot's piano compositions,—preludes with occult titles and a still more occult purport. To get the purport of this music, Max had told him, a little-patronizingly, you must banish from consciousness all the music you had ever heard before and listen with a new ear. Despite a few electrifying flashes, a few moments of inner turmoil, the net result for Grover had 'been a headache, though, as in the case of Casimir's submarine painting, he could feel the projection of some compelling, undeniably authentic force. That would explain the fast spiritual bond between Casimir and Racicot, than whom two men had assuredly never been more unlike as to externals.

How many times, in the good old safe, hideous, red sitting-room in Cambridge had he argued that only a man with "a beautiful soul and beautiful tastes"

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 could turn out a beautiful composition, yet how many times in the last few months had his breathless eagerness on entering the haunt of a creator turned to disgust when the sanctum proved to be either a sort of moral shambles where after drinking a number of anis del oso's everybody, after the manner of the characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, got crushes on somebody other than his or her acknowledged or suspected paramour, or else a musty parlor filled with bourgeois amenities and photographs in plush frames. Yet the oddest part of it all was that when you had learned to pick and reject, to test merit with a solvent that assimilated the spurious ore and left only the metal, you were back triumphantly to your old sophomoric convictions that beauty was engendered by beauty,—degeneracy and gold-legged chairs notwithstanding. It was only that in the first reaction one had mistaken the unlovely parts for the whole. True to one's heritage one had assumed that Beauty ceased to be beautiful when there were spots on her garment. Why, a splash of blood on the white doorway of a house in Chestnut Street would be, in the eyes of Massachusetts, a hideous blemish, not because red was ugly against white for it wasn't, but because Boston loved the respectability proclaimed by spotless doorways, and abhorred murder. Whereas beauty had no more to do with respectability and murder than—oh, than digestion had to do with the price of butter. The disillusion and the discouragement was a matter

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 of mental, moral, physical, and romantic bias; once you had eliminated prejudice and prudishness and agreed on the angle of vision, on the definition of terms, the old theses over which, as Rhoda Marple had once remarked, you had been wont to muss your hair and talk yourself blue in the face till daybreak, held water perfectly. And he could almost wish to be back in the Harvard Union to display this new feather he had got in his cap. In the old days he had only passionately felt he was right; now he passionately and with a tinge of bitterness, knew.

He was skirting the Buttes Chaumont and at a turn in the road caught sight of Mme. Casimir, leaning forward in her car to give an instruction to the chauffeur she had once brought home from the model market. There was a softer light in her eyes than the usual glitter. Grover wondered what the chauffeur had got for New Year's and hurried on, picturing to himself Mme. Casimir's arrival at home: the two men of genius talking like a house afire about their symptoms,—their wives, with excessive amiability, falling into a discussion of the immorality of cooks, eyeing each other with a deadly accuracy, while the little Racicots nibbled cakes and viciously pinched each other under the table.

Idly he wondered what had become of Max Bruff. The essential cheapness of Max showed up clearly in contrast to the patient sufferings of the man to whom he paid such fervent tribute. Though Max had a very

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 real gift and incredible agility, he was without the capacity for martyrdom. From the bitter musical truth of a Racicot, Max and his ilk scooped off and served up the sweet froth, catching the public fancy with it and enjoying an immediate vogue. But the public, after the first exhilaration, would tire of the froth and turn to Racicot for the real beverage. By that time Max would be rich and—Racicot would be under the sod, his resting place marked by a heap of bead and wire wreaths.

And his gouty old friend Casimir, tenacious of life, fondly recalling réunions agréeables with his musical confrere, would say, with a pregnant shake of his massive head, not what a Harvard man's notion of a genius would be expected to utter, but just what a sorrowful janitor might say, "Ce que c'est que de nous!"

Amen, reflected Grover—and Selah.

see the force of Casimir's counsel was one thing: to apply it another. As Grover turned from subject to subject, from still-lifes to portraits of Mme. Choiseul and Mouche,—which Madame confidently expected to see one day on the walls of the Luxembourg and for

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 that reason had put on all her jewelry,—he nursed a growing resentment against Casimir's verdict. If there was one thing by which he didn't want to be identified, it was a nice little talent. That seemed to doom him to the role of an eternal gracer of tea tables. Cast down by his lack of progress, filled with frustration, out of touch with himself and life, he decided one cold afternoon of February to look up Léon. For weeks he had been lying low, eating in cab-drivers' resorts, washing his own socks and handkerchiefs, all because of his Boston bank's maddening accuracy in arithmetic. Now that his American clothes had worn thin it was not going to be so easy to make ends meet on his small income. But this morning a cheque had arrived, and he had rushed out to draw some cash. In the same mail had come a letter from Rhoda Marple, the first in months. She announced that she was departing for Egypt with the Pearns,—"and you know what I think of mummies," she had commented, in a tone of despondency which chimed with his own. The only mitigating circumstance of her journey was that Mrs. Peperell, who would be in Cairo, would see to it that she had an opportunity to go about with young people.

Not a word about Eric, Grover noted, as he walked to the apartment facing the Parc Monceau. The most bothersome as well as the most puzzling element in his relationship with Rhoda was the fact that he could never reconcile himself to the thought of her marrying any man he knew, though heaven was his witness that

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 he didn't want to marry her himself. There was no more than a guest room for good old Rhoda in the house he was painfully building for himself.

He mounted the stairs at a run, no longer timid in this pretentious building, and found the door to Léon's apartment wide open. Doubtless the servant had descended on some errand. With a casual knock he walked in and crossed the lobby to the salon. This room he had never entered without experiencing the same sensation of a psychic presence, which, for convenience, he had decided to attribute to Noémi Janvier. A woman of such vibrant energy, he told himself, couldn't help leaving an electric charge behind which would remain potent for many months.

His mind on guard against this psychic force, he was all the more startled when he beheld a strange girl seated on the piano, swinging her legs either impatiently or nonchalantly, he couldn't make out, for her face was as smooth and expressionless as a stone.

For a moment he stood transfixed, then hastily excused himself for so rudely intruding, and stood ready to retreat, if desired.

"Entrez donc, Monsieur. You are looking for my brother?"

"I was looking for M. Vaudreuil."

She nodded her head. "C'est le même."

"But I didn't know he had a sister!" exclaimed Grover.

"No?" The implication which Grover read into her

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 tone was that there might be many things about Léon he didn't know.

Then he recalled that Léon and a sister had played the children in A Doll's House to an unappreciative audience in Lyon.

He was extremely ill at ease. Something in the girl's calm surveyal of him made him feel weak and maladroit. If she had asked him to sit down he might have overcome the feeling, but apparently that amenity hadn't occurred to her. As for her, she hadn't budged from her strange perch, except to reach for a cigarette.

At length, with an explosive little sigh of impatience, she pulled off her dark blue béret and Grover took the liberty to place himself in a corner of the sofa, while she smoothed her hair. As he watched her his feeling of embarrassment took a strange turn; it was becoming a feeling of fascination. Her hair was like corduroy in color; and it had the same dull sheen. A mixture of gold and fawn, as though gold had been painted on where the light ought to strike and then the head had moved out so that the light really struck the brown patches and the gold was in shadow. The effect was dull, rich, mottled, bizarre. The gold and fawn shades stole into her cheeks and behind her ears. She was all in shades of ivory, honey, amber, and amethyst. For her deadish white skin the only adjective Grover could find was "callow," which he immediately rejected as absurd. Her body, sheathed in a

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 dark blue tailored costume, was as strong and slender as something winged.

She looked up and caught his gaze rooted upon her. For a moment her expression seemed to say, Well, I hope you'll know me the next time you see me, then it relented and her brows raised slightly, rampling her smooth forehead into an almost comical frown. Her eyes were intelligent, grayish in color, if one could judge by the peculiar light in the room, but the underlids seemed to press them half shut, as though the eyes disliked to be left unprotected. These eyes seemed to be the jealous, exacting guardians of all her features. They saw everything but begrudged any acknowledgment of understanding. In consequence, when she frowned, or even casually spoke, there were tiny folds at the corners of her eyes and lips which served as awarning. This girl will say what she means, in spite of us, they announced.

Grover had felt all this but had not had time to formulate it. He saw merely a firm, squarish face which again surprised him by breaking into a smile, a broad but tucked-in smile, incongruously pleasant when contrasted with the hardness he had first noted and with the annoyed frown, which it hadn't quite dislodged. Her countenance was now a mixture of clouds and sunshine, as though while the stranger who had walked in was engaging enough to arouse a spark of friendliness, still he was not Léon, and she was

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 waiting for Léon, in fact tapping her fingers in annoyance at his tardiness.

"The servant said he had just run out to telephone," she explained.

"The door was open when I came in. Perhaps she has gone to fetch him."

But this theory proved false, as the door presently slammed and the servant could be heard in the kitchen.

"She's none too amiable," said Léon's sister.

"I am very amiable," said Grover. "Perhaps I could be of some service."

She braced her feet against the arm of an ottoman, her hands clasped firmly on the edge of the piano-top. They were strong white hands, as white as though they had been soaked for hours in sea water.

"I'm in a very bad temper," she confessed.

"It suits you beautifully."

"Don't be silly," she said, and meant it. The toss of her head which accompanied the reprimand proved that her gray eyes were capable of occasional shafts of color.

"Well, since we're both waiting for Léon you might be nice enough to tell me what your bad temper is about. Of course I could go out and wait in the kitchen with the unamiable cook, if that would help."

"Mais, regardez donc!" she cried dramatically, twisting her leg and pointing to the back of her stocking.

"Is that all?" asked Grover in genuine surprise,

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 though there was no denying the fact that the great jagged tear in the silk was a serious blemish in her otherwise faultless turn-out.

"All! All! And you expect me to get across Paris like that? Bah, merci alors!"

"I don't expect anything," said Grover humbly. "But why not make for the nearest shop?"

She heaved a great sigh of forebearance. "Because I had no money with me! Now do you see?"

With the best will in the world it was hard to take the situation tragically. Indeed when he reflected upon Léon's chronic insolvency, it harbored an element of comedy. Still the bills of the Vaudreuil family must get themselves paid by somebody.

He was about to suggest a solution, one of several that occurred to him, when she hopped down from the piano and went to look out the high window. Coming back at once and stopping before his chair, she amazed him by saying, "You're far too good for Léon; what the devil are you doing here?"

"Trying desperately not to bore you," he confessed with a grim rush of words.

She paid no heed to them, but again surveyed her stocking. "Oh-h-h!" she was crying, in a low tone of horror. "Que c'est ennuyeux! . . . Where do you suppose he is? It's always been like that—if at any time I needed him, and it hasn't been often, he wasn't there."

A dozen questions had arisen in Grover's mind as

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 to the family of this strange brother and sister; the chances were that they would never be answered. The much-talked-of reticence of Anglo-Saxons, he had learned, was as nothing compared to the reticence of a Latin.

"How did it happen?" he inquired.

She explained that she had been on her way to a studio in Montparnasse. In changing omnibuses at Place Clichy her heel had caught in a step, and the damage had been done when she tried to save herself from a fall. "I scratched my leg too," she added, "and it hurts. . . . The worst of it is I shall be very late for my appointment."

By this time he liked her so well, or rather he was so completely under her spell, that he dreaded for her the postponement of her appointment, whatever it might be,—and it was as likely as not an amatory one, Paris being Paris.

"I think it is useless to wait for Léon," he said. "Won't you let me advance the necessary sum?" Thank heaven, he could.

"Oh, Monsieur, that would be noble of you."

"We can take a taxicab to the shop. Have you any preference?"

"Yes—the nearest."

He handed her the béret she had left on the piano.

"What's your name?" she asked.

He told her. "And yours?"

"Olga."

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 They drove to the Avenue de Clichy. "Everything on this street is lamentably cheap," she said. "But anything will do."

They got out at a shop which displayed half its wares in the open. When Olga had picked out a pair of stockings which suited her she retired into the shop to effect the change.

She returned smiling, her merriment held in by the odd little folds at her eyes, and Grover walked with her as far as the bus corner.

"Don't tear these," he cautioned her as the bus was stopping.

"I'd do it in a minute," she threw out at him, over her shoulder, "if I thought it would gain me another nice little friend like you."

"There aren't any more like me," Grover declared, envious of the blackguardly rest. "The next one wouldn't let you off so easy."

She laughed, and the little folds made a valiant attempt to throw her last remark off at a tangent. "Sometimes one is lucky, sometimes not."

It was only after the bus had borne her away beyond recall that he reflected, with a start: which way did she mean that?

If he had been depressed when he entered Léon's apartment, he was more than ever depressed on returning toward the rue Truffaut. It seemed to him

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