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 "Oh, quelle horreur!" Olga commented, making a grimace as she poured the mixture into a glass with her strong white hands. Mamie was bewailing the trials of singers, whose delicate throats forbade indulgence in alcohol.

Olga, who was drinking tea, challenged this with an account of certain ladies whom she, with her own eyes, had seen so completely "zigzag" that they had to be almost carried home. Yet the very next night they would be on the job, howling their heads off as Manon or the tearful Charlotte. "You take things very seriously, Mademoiselle," she remarked. "Du reste," she added, "it's a characteristic of Americans. N'est-ce pas, Monsieur?"

Grover could only admit, with a terrible conviction, that it was.

As he walked down the hill from Hellgren's house,—Mamie had had the good grace to rush home and dress for another engagement,—Grover warned himself sadly that he must not return to it. In Hellgren's babyish eyes, in his caresses, in his pathetic efforts to render himself agreeable, in his hospitable zeal, Grover had detected an undertone of fear, a purely subconscious fear. One incident in particular had revealed it. When they had all settled into easy talk, after the afternoon light had gone, leaving the salon in shadow, Olga, her mind pursuing her gaze over the rooftops of the city, had sighed, a conspicuous event, for usually she could be depended on to be more quietly alert to

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 immediate surroundings than anyone in whose company she happened to be. Hellgren had observed the sigh, and his leathery lips had twitched as he anxiously reached forth a hand toward hers. At this she had caught herself together, and smiled for him, whereupon Grover had heaved a sigh of his own, which had probably gone undetected.

Shortly afterwards he had taken leave.

I can't go back, he was now repeating. It isn't fair.

The sight of Olga, the fact of having been in her presence for two hours during which there had been established a friendly, if impersonal intimacy, stilled the restlessness that had possessed him for so many barren weeks, and he resumed his painting with something of the old zest. His skill, thanks to much irksome exercise, had improved sufficiently to justify confidence in his ability to progress. Though the canvas still infuriated him by declining to reflect what he saw, nevertheless his strokes were beginning to look more like the strokes of a real painter. Passing judgment on himself, he concluded that his chief asset was taste, his chief liability lack of "morale"—and that, when you came to think of it, was a pretty serious lack. Faith, hope and charity, he reflected, and the greatest of these is not charity, but faith. For what mountains would mere charity move!

As the season turned definitely into spring, bringing

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 sunshine so strong that you didn't need your overcoat, he undertook expeditions into the country, sometimes in company with students of his own master, a set with whom he had no trouble in keeping on amiable terms but with whom he had no promptings to "mix." Indeed his lack of interest in these earnest and erratic souls caused him to marvel. Perhaps, he concluded, they are artists and I am not.

Fortified by the generosity of his own decision not to play the traitor, he was for several days, even for weeks, able to thrust his emotions aside,—or rather, he persuaded himself that he was transmuting his passion into channels which would irrigate more profitable areas. In other words, another dose of the Professor Thanet's logical formulae. Gradually, however, they surged back into the reservoir where they exerted such an intolerable pressure. Then some neglected ego within him invented arguments designed to break down his noble resolutions. Your fancied nobility, it whispered, is pure poppycock; what have heroics to do with love? Heroics belong in the realm of sentimentality, and a very old-fashioned brand at that. It's an age of speed, of quick returns on investment, of catch as catch can. If you propose to be noble, you'd better retire into a hermitage, and end your days in proud isolation. The best you can then hope for is to be stuffed and exhibited as the last known specimen of the honnête homme.

Most of all, this neglected and sarcastic ego kept

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 telling him that in the lives of people like Olga and Hellgren and all the rest of the bohemian herd, gentlemanliness was not only a ludicrous garment but a positive hindrance to hygienic self-expression. They don't wear it, argued his daemon; why should you?

And the image came insistently back, keeping him awake by night, sending him off into blind alleys by day, tying him into knots, and driving him into the corner of town where Marthe and her bedraggled colleagues touched elbows in the mean light that filtered through orange cotton lampshades bedecked with purple crepe roses, drinking bad alcohol to reassure themselves of their right to exist.

On two or three occasions Marthe had been absent, and when she did appear she showed traces of the hysteria that had often made him fear for her. It was a singular fact that when he arrived in good spirits her own thermometer fell, and she would either whip herself into a state of despondency or break into mirthful obscenities. On the other hand if he were in low spirits, her solicitude never failed, and out of such moments would spring the tender, ripe, and stoical comments which were so much stronger than Marthe's own ability to guide herself by them. She was like a mariner who, at the bidding of orders which cannot be disputed, has uncomplainingly left port on a ship he knows to be unseaworthy.

For weeks he kept his resolve. True, he went oftener than before to Floss's, but that, he argued, was

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 a legitimate compromise; even there he seldom caught Sight of Olga. Then Floss went to Biarritz, and he was alone in all Paris, wasting precious hours at the Deme, in the unacknowledged hope that Olga would walk past, on her way to or from the house a few streets distant.

Sooner or later every lost soul turned up at the Deme,—that was both its attraction and its curse,—and one soggy afternoon in May, when the staleness of his work, combined with his inability to indulge in the refreshing vacations that seemed possible to everyone but his own improvident self had reduced him to a low ebb of vitality, as he dragged tired limbs and jangled nerves along the less sunny side of the Boulevard Raspail toward the inevitable cafe, he caught sight of Hellgren and Mamie Mangum, at a table on the terrasse.

"You're just the one," Mamie greeted him, "to complete the party. We're going up the river for dinner."

Without definitely accepting—for he didn't yet know whether it was a party of three or four,—Grover praised the idea and sat down with them.

"Tomorrow I go to Bordeaux for a conference," Hellgren explained, and Grover's heart made a guilty leap. "We'll celebrate beforehand. When I come back there may be nothing to celebrate."

From this unwieldy attempt at humor Grover guessed that the bourgeois committee of Bordeaux were not seeing eye to eye with the impetuous Scan-

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 dinavian. The difficulty had something to do with a suitable location for the monument. "I won't have my column lit up by the electric rays from an advertisement for beer," Hellgren had been heard to declare.

Not till they had finished their apéritif did Grover learn that they were to call for Olga, who knew nothing of the plan, which, so Grover now concluded, was of Mamie's devising. Secure in that guess, he could the more easily silence his own conscience; for if the party had a squinty air, the responsibility could be laid upon Mamie's shoulders: shoulders which could roll it off with a borrowed gesture. Her conscience would never stand in her way. If the Italian impresario to whom Tamponi had recommended her were to make sly advances before signing the half promised contract, the chances were that poor Mamie would leap at him; Paris wasn't half as demoralizing as she had expected it to be.

Olga came out of the salon and met them on the balcony overlooking the studio. She was in a soft white dress that made her look cool and slim. Her hair seemed thicker and richer than ever, and massed high on her head it revealed a pair of ears that seemed wasted on such a massive sculptor as Hellgren.

She greeted the proposal of an excursion with a squeal that had, for Grover, a hint of almost hysterical relief in it. This impression was corroborated by her manner toward Mamie, which was more cordial than Mamie had any right to expect; it was almost as though

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 she were thankful for Mamie, incomprehensible to her though the lanky American girl in her yellow make-up and brick-colored draperies must certainly be.

Despite the crowds on the quay and on the boat, the trip up the river was pleasant. The intolerable brightness of the day gave place to a soft, beneficent twilight that promised to linger, as though it were already summertime, and there was a thrilling hush over the world as they walked up the path toward the inn.

They chose a table on a porch that hung over the river, and there was a general tendency to lean forward, elbows on the cloth, and forget every irritating fact in life, assume that angles were round, that the odds were in one's favor, and all the inevitables, evitable. There was contented and easy laughter to spare for inane remarks that normally, Grover felt, would have made exhaustive drains on patience. Why have I been so foolish, was the little cry of pent-up emotion within himself. Just see how safe it all is!

It was a question of what to drink. Hellgren's choice was beer, and Mamie followed his lead, explaining that her new coach didn't object to that beverage. Besides, thought Grover, she'd drink iodine if Hellgren did.

He and Olga in the same breath voted for white wine, and their eyes met. Some kite that he had been holding to earth till consciousness was numb from the ache slipped quickly away and went soaring over the treetops, the willows and the poplars, across the lemon

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 colored sky. His shoe accidentally,—then, God help him deliberately,—touched a surface which his prosaic self recognized as fine leather, but which his more rarefied self recognized as the anchorage of the kite string.

They ate and drank and laughed and talked. Not a thing worth saying was said, and the brunt of it all was sustained by Mamie and Hellgren. Olga and Grover contributed punctuation. It didn't matter what was said, thought Grover, so long as those two could be urged and prodded to fill up the gap created by their existence on earth. What did matter was that an orchestra in another part of the building,—downstairs in a bigger room,—was playing. What also mattered, enormously, desperately, was that he and Olga recognized,—he dared guess it,—and instinctively responded to some hysterical overtone in the high spirits of the other; and each challenged the other's waywardness by pouring more wine. Is it just spring, he wondered? Is it a sign of transition from some weary old order into a vertiginous new one? Or in God's name, what?

"If we went down and danced a little!" Grover proposed.

"Oh, oui!" Olga agreed, as though she had been impatiently awaiting the suggestion.

There couldn't have been a better excuse than the music for the mood they were so eager to throw themselves into, each for his own reason, possibly, but none the less eagerly for that. The rhythms had the effect

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 of abolishing every inhibition, every faculty except sense, which was left free, tingling, communicable.

Let's talk about my sweetie now!

The vulgarity of it, but the grotesque patness! His partner wouldn't have known the meaning of the American words, even had he sung them aloud, and that added a piquancy to it all. Everything tonight added a piquancy.

Olga was not the same girl: she was a dryad running from his pursuit, yet pausing to let him catch up. Never would he have believed himself capable of holding Olga, of all women in the world, so intimately, of kissing her with such abandon. They said nothing, for words had been abolished along with the rest. She must have been terrifically surprised at his behavior, and her own! yet no faintest sign of surprise was there.

But it was time to go back, and retaining the glow in tightly clasped hands they mounted the stairs. At the door leading to the porch Grover was suddenly reendowed with the necessary, superfluous circumspections of which the dance had momentarily debarrassed him. Glib words were at hand. Oscar was ready with his subconsciously fearful affectionateness, and Mamie rolled her white eyes at Grover in a regard of dawning suspicion—and envy, not malicious, merely pathetic.

During the remainder of the evening Olga resumed her impersonal manner, and not until Grover took leave of them all at his disembarking point did she again

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 acknowledge what their proximity had meant. Even then it was only by a warm return pressure of his hand, and a smouldering hint of blue in her gray eyes,—a hint which the little guardian folds quickly attempted to deny.

Hellgren was going away, and it was caddish to steal that advantage, but he no longer cared. He seized a private moment to invite Olga to lunch.

In a matter of fact tone she suggested that he lunch at the house instead. "After lunch," she added, "I'm going out to Enghien to visit my aunt."

What's her damn aunt got to do with it, he wondered, but even that hypothetical lady couldn't damp the raging flame.

When he arrived next morning Olga was slicing cabbages and green peppers into a sulphur-colored salad bowl and mixing the contents with a red spoon. His offer to make the dressing was accepted, and she let him find his own materials in the cupboard.

While she broke eggs for the omelette he was allowed to light the gas and cut the bread. Then the bell rang, and the concierge came up to say that M. Peñaverde was calling.

"Oh, miséricorde!" Olga wailed, and reached for two extra eggs.

Grover, in silence, lit a cigarette.

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 "We're in the kitchen," she called out, when the visitor's step was heard, and Don Armando entered.

"Tiens!" he exclaimed, with his nasal Spanish accent, and nothing in his expression indicated whether or not he was displeased to see Grover. "When the prime minister is away, on se fiche de la république, quoi!"

"Oh, non!" Olga laconically retorted, "on fait la cuisine. You arrive too late to help make lunch, but you may help eat it. It will be good."

"That I am certain of. But unfortunately I can't stay."

Grover offered Don Armando a cigarette, which the Spaniard politely declined in favor of his own brand of Russian cigarettes, with long paper mouthpieces.

"I merely called," he explained, "to ask if you wouldn't come to the theatre with me this evening, and have supper with some friends."

"Je regrette, Monsieur. I have promised my aunt."

"I seem to have arrived too late for everything," said Don Armando.

The omelette was sizzling, the two unnecessary eggs having been thriftily replaced. "Mais, Monsieur," Olga ignored the implications of his remark, "If everyone were always on time, all the charm of accident would be lost."

Grover, hoping she was thinking of their own first accidental meeting, when Léon had arrived too late,

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 if at all, gave himself the benefit of the doubt and smiled inwardly.

When the omelette was browned, Olga transferred it deftly to a platter under the grill and accompanied Peñaverde to the balcony.

On her return her movements were even more brisk, and they were soon seated at a small table in the bandbox salon.

"Why are all these stupid men enraged to have me pose for them?" she half soliloquized, with an anger that was very real, though Grover felt it to be directed at an object which hadn't been defined. She broke off a neat slice of bread which she began to make fun of, calling it severe and English.

"The answer is easy," Grover replied. The painter's visit had brought ghosts into the room and created an uncomfortable hiatus.

Now that she was at rest, a reflective mood was overtaking her. "Though it's bad enough," she was saying, almost as though he were not present, "to be obliged to sit in this stuffy house and boil coffee while my Swede splits blocks of marble. Ah, those statues—they stupify me; they will be the death of me. That one of the woman holding in her hand the scales of justice! Grands dieux! . . . What do you say about it, Prince? Hein, the prince there, who sits and thinks."

"I'm thinking, 'poor Oscar'!"

"Pas si pauvre que ça, va! He'll look a long while

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 before he finds another who will make clothes for herself year in and year out so that he can economize and fill the place with rocks and chisels for his enervating noises. Perhaps he thinks one gives up one's youth as freely as if one had two or three more in the cupboard—bah, merci alors!. . . And the prince there, who thinks so much that he doesn't eat his salad—dites, Prince!"

"He thinks things he doesn't dare say."

"Meanwhile one looks at the coffee. You are coming into the kitchen, Prince?"

"Why do you call me Prince?" asked Grover, lighting a cigarette and boldly offering it to her. As nonchalantly as though it hadn't touched his lips she accepted, and they waited for the coffee to percolate. The air was heavy with clouds of emotional rain.

"Because you are charming," she said with a smile that no one, Grover thought, would be justified in misconstruing as an overture.

"And on that fatal day, when you suddenly take it into your head to desert the camp—"

She interrupted. "I didn't say it!"

"But if you do! And if a prince were waiting outside—had been waiting and waiting?"

The coffee was ready to pour. "What a conspiracy!" she laughed. "Anyone would say I was not fond of Oscar. But I am."

"And the noises? And the monotony?"

She motioned him to his seat at the table again.

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 "Ah that's it!" she sighed. "The monotony. Though for that matter I could be happy in a cabin in the country with a cow and a pig and a few chickens. Here chick, chick, chick! That makes far more sense than all their cackle in the studios."

"But not alone!"

She scarcely heard him; she was admiring the idyll she had conjured up. "Ah, what happiness!"

"With me?" he insisted, his voice almost failing.

"Drink your coffee, Prince. Princes don't live in cabins; they live in palaces and don't think of the rent,—palaces that don't even exist—air palaces."

"Couldn't you live in an air palace?"

She burst into a merry laugh, which the little folds this time made no attempt to derail. "I'm the most practical girl in Paris," she declared.

"And the most seductive," he retorted passionately, "and unhappy—which isn't as it should be. You see what a mistake it is to be so practical. There's something to be said for air palaces. They're beautiful." Her taunt still hurt him, and whipped the flame higher. Suddenly, with a sensation of dizziness, he heard words coming to his lips which he couldn't check, however irrevocably they might alter his old inherited world.

"Would you marry me?" he asked.

Her merriment, her nonchalance faded. Into her face came a look of hardness that reminded him of the sphinx he had first seen petched upon Léon's piano. Then the hardness melted into an expression of tender-

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 ness that he had never seen her wear. "What a nice prince!" she was saying in quiet tones that sent a dull pain through him, for it was an answer to his question, and an answer in the negative.

He remained silent, for there were no words for the surging emotions that crowded up into his throat.

Olga was shaking her head, a little pensively. "You don't know me," she said, and her tone had turned almost sharp.

"What does that matter?" he cried, half scornfully. "If one is in love, and has been for months, isn't that enough?"

She shook her head again. "No, not enough—all the more, if one is really in love. If love weren't there it wouldn't so much matter."

"Don't talk nonsense!" he cried, pushing his chair from the table in a wild need to plead his cause with some language more potent than words.

She warded him off with her hand. She was drawing herself out of a revery which seemed to include him, without centering around him.

"No," she said, as if finding an answer to her own thoughts, "It's as stupid to think impractical things as it is to do them. Life is bargaining."

"It's unbearable to hear you talk like that," cried Grover, almost at breaking point. Then he returned to the charge armed with logic. "Mettons que c'est un troc—even on that basis you can't have more to gain by staying on here. You've been here two years;

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 you've paid all you owe, and more, to Oscar. Don't you owe something to yourself?"

It was taking much for granted to assume that if she paid what she owed to herself it would be to him that she would turn, but he must take that for granted; he must assume it from her very willingness to listen, from the memory of last night!

She looked at him with steady eyes, while the lips—puckered into a whimsical smile which seemed to him to say, Though many men, and strange ones too, have besieged me, you're the most strangely argumentative of the lot. Others plead with their bodies; your body is mute and your words are badly representing it. Before his eyes she had grown into a mature woman facing facts honestly, though, as he felt, from a wrong angle; and now she was the dissembling girl of twenty again.

"Come and dry the crockery while I wash it," she said, springing up from her chair, and reaching for his hand to lead him off. "Then we'll go to Enghien together."

There's not a woman on earth, he was bitterly reflecting, but loves to dance on a moral precipice. Not a woman on earth but would, in evading the main issue, hold out a hope to be caught at. It would be kinder, he was thinking, if she would turn me out to die of my malady. Yet like all men he was desperately glad of the sop she had flung to him. What might one

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 not convince her of, with a whole afternoon at one's disposal!

The journey in the suburban train was uncomfortable, and they both had a mind for silence. The aunt lived in a cheaply over-ornamented villa on the shore of the lake near the casino, and Grover took the boat and rowed through waters clogged with reeds while Olga went inside to rummage. She had brought an empty portmanteau in which to take back some articles that belonged to her.

Something squinted. First of all, how could Olga and Léon have an aunt who was obviously a Jewess?

The explanation was forthcoming after dinner, when they waited at the station for their train. The so-called aunt was merely the woman with whom Olga's father had spent his last years on earth. This woman had been kinder than her mother, an ex-musichall artiste who was now at large in the south, when last heard of. The most astonishing part of the revelation was that Olga could apparently be left unmoved by all the implied sordidness in such a state of affairs. With Olga's taste, with all the qualities that set her apart and enshrined her, it was hard to reconcile the lack of shame for such gracelessness in the very structure of one's family. He dropped it into the limbo of subjects on which it is unprofitable to dwell.

It was eleven o'clock when they reached the house on Montparnasse. Olga had said nothing in contradiction to what she had said during lunch, but her

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 manner all day, quiet and abstracted, bore witness to a great deal of cogitation. There was no telling to what conclusions her thoughts might have led. Grover was calling down the aid of all the aphorisms about women he had ever heard: that women had been known to change their minds, that their No was not to be taken as final. It had been a strange day, full of poignant moments, and now it was at an end,—for whatever private conclusions Olga had reached, his instinct told him that rashness would only hinder his cause. Other men might succeed by methods which would only be foreign to him.

At the door she turned and faced him, holding out her hand for her portmanteau with a noncommital smile.

"May I come to see you tomorrow?" he asked.

"Not tomorrow."

"The day after? . . . If you like we can go up the river and dine—and dance."

Her smile turned indulgent, a little wry. "Yes, that's what we'll do."

The concierge had opened the door and was handing her a note that had been left for her.

"Bonsoir, Prince!" she called back to him.

Lacking a safe margin for the dinner party, he was obliged to borrow a hundred francs from Mme. Choiseul, thus enrolling himself on the long and

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 mournful list of her debtors. She made not the slightest demur, however,—even suggested that two hundred might be more convenient to him, but Grover declined. As usual he was waiting for a cheque from Boston.

Olga was still in her brooding mood when he called for her. "Ah, it's the prince," she said.

"Oscar will return at five-thirty," she announced when he was seated in the salon. "I've just received a telegram."

Grover stared sightlessly through the window as he might have stared through the window of the Marple nursery in the days when Emma Kittendorf used to snatch Rhoda away for her nap, leaving him alone with the toys that were useless so long as Rhoda wasn't there to share his enjoyment in them. The thought of Rhoda was prompted by a letter he had received from Lucerne stating that she was on her way to Paris. And he had a feverish desire to arm himself against Rhoda with the knowledge that Olga would succumb.

"That cancels our dinner on the river," he said, in a tone that implied the cancellation of so much else.

Olga had to lay in stores for her Scandinavian's big breakfasts, and together they set out for market. Then it was time to go to the train to meet Hellgren.

Not once had she mentioned Peñaverde, though he had undoubtedly called, for in the on the mantel of the salon there were two hollow paper ends of the Russian cigarettes he invariably smoked. Doubtless she refrained from speaking of his visit because

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 of its distastefulness, and that Grover could well understand.

She insisted that he accompany her to the Gare d'Orsay, and they arrived in time to see Hellgren come through the gate, clad in a baggy linen suit, mopping his forehead, eagerly smiling. Olga had made a visible effort and was yielding to his fat, proprietory embrace. His greeting for Grover was as friendly as ever.

They drove home and left the luggage with the concierge, proceeding to a restaurant of the quartier for dinner. Grover accompanied them to the house again, since both insisted, and because he suspected that Olga dreaded being left alone with her lover. Then he regretted having done so, for Olga seemed to have developed some fiendish desire to make him wince by bestowing caresses and attentions on Hellgren, while the latter beamed like a human sun on an acre of conjugal felicity.

Hellgren was tired; consequently to his simple way of reasoning, Grover must be tired, and when the latter rose to take leave, though it was only ten o'clock, his host offered him a bedroom for the night, even begged him to remain. For one of the grotesque features of the situation was that Grover, by his forced concentration on Hellgren's sculptures at the time of his first visit, had aroused a fervent partiality in the sculptor's bosom. In his bitterness Grover reflected that even Olga couldn't have conceived a more exquisite form

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 of torture than that opened up by her lover's well-meant suggestion.

Olga accompanied him across the little balcony and down the stairs to the outer door, and there, for the first time, and to Grover's joy and dismay, held out her hand and said to him, almost shyly, with tender eyes,—a delicious new phase of her,—"I love you, Prince!"

He caught her up and held her, while in the distance a burst of contented Scandinavian whistling echoed from wall to wall of the great atelier. At that they clung to each other more tightly. Then she wished to be released.

next morning he telephoned, but Olga was not at home. The concierge believed she had gone to visit her aunt, who was ill. Grover left a message and asked the concierge to call him upon Mlle. Vaudreuil's return.

It was Sunday, and the two nondescript men who also had lodgings in Mme. Choiseul's apartment were reading newspapers in the grande pièce, luxuriating in their weekly day of rest and ruining what little comfort the room might hold for Grover. He decided to walk

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 in the sun-splashed streets before the promenaders made their appearance.

Never had the magic of Paris been more potent, never had he walked its streets with such a Shelley-like sensation of being borne on clouds. The only fly in his ointment was the contretemps caused by the illness of Olga's inconvenient pseudo-aunt.

For Hellgren he was genuinely sorry, but no court of love could hold him, Grover Thanet, responsible for the fact that Hellgren was no longer loved, if ever he had been. But—intrusive thought—if Olga had never loved Oscar, how could she have allied herself with him? Women sometimes let themselves in for that sort of thing, he supposed, without knowing the meaning of a real love that was destined to overtake them. It was a game in which Hellgren had played, and for two years running, won; now it was another's turn. Despite which consoling sophistry one could scarcely use Hellgren's blindness and hospitality as a screen for covert glances and whisperings. That sort of clandestine operations,—so much in vogue,—revolted him. His relation with Olga must be different, even if they had to wait until a feasible plan could be evolved, until they could establish their very own privacy. A fairly substantial cheque was on its way across the Atlantic: enough to let them escape. He must look up some modest retreat—for a honeymoon!

The thing to do was to hold grimly to the helm till some harbor hove into view. Women were ingenious

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 in such emergencies. Meanwhile his cloud floated him toward the Parc Monceau which was proudly displaying its fashionable spring foliage, in all shades of green from canary to bottle. He passed through the great iron grille and strolled down the path toward a penny chair which gave him a view of the group of lovely, mellow, crumbling Corinthian pillars mirrored in the surface of the lake. Lonely, haphazard souls strolled by him at intervals, mostly decent and anaemic men and women, each with a bunion or a limp, or a hat that belied the face under it. Life is hard, Grover commiserated, and not many can bear the weight of it without cracking or developing excrescences.

One girl, standing near the edge of the water and throwing crumbs to the birds, was a beautiful exception to prove the rule. Her back was turned, but in its slimness and smartness one could take an impersonal joy. When one woman belongs to you, he reflected in contentment, it's as though the beauty of all other women were paying tribute to her. Only your French women had the clue to real chic; aside from their taste there was an indefinable style in their manner of standing, of walking. She had turned into a path, her gaze idly directed toward a statue, when, with a gasp, he rose to catch a closer glimpse of her.

Rhoda!

And not French at all!

With a thrill that tore through him he hurried after her. She had halted before the clinging marble figures

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 of Marguerite and Juliette who paid homage to the suave Gounod, and with an unwonted trepidation, almost giddiness, Grover softly approached and laid a hand on her shoulder.

Without fuss she drew away, and turned to face the intruder, then with a comical stare that transformed her from an elegant young mondaine to a flushed, excited, bright-eyed girl, she relaxed and he kissed her, "park and all" as Rhoda expressed it, straightening her hat after the assault.

There were quick, confused explanations. Hadn't he got her letter? She had sent a pneumatique inviting him to lunch with her and the Pearns.

Grover had not received it.

"Didn't you spend the night at home?" she asked, teasingly.

He was almost frightened at the realization that he almost hadn't! and he gave her an ambiguous smile. There had been nights, a few, that he had spent away from the rue Truffaut, and Rhoda was doubtless seeing at a glance that he was no longer the innocent little boy,—yet her knowledge of that, strangely, blessedly, didn't dim the steady affectionateness of her regard. He hadn't thought to look for any mail that morning; Mme. Choiseul had taken to her bed with a recurrence of blotches, which might account for his failure to receive the note.

"As a matter of fact I almost didn't write it," Rhoda added.

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 "Why not?"

In his mind a panic-stricken voice was whispering: Remember what she did to you and Sophie; don't let her do it to you and Olga!

She was still smiling, though there was evidence of wounded pride in her eyes. "Do you know how many letters I've written you in the last few months that you've rudely ignored?"

"Quite a few, I bet," Grover admitted.

"All but two," she reproached him. "And both signed hastily yours. You must be the busiest man in Paris."

She explained that they had arrived last night, and this morning Aunty Pearn had made a bee-line for the American church. "We've dragged the God of our Fathers and Philip Brooks right across the Sahara and half way up the Matterhorn. The air of this town smells too deliciously pagan for words. Won't you take me to some haunts of iniquity before we sail?"

They had sauntered out of the park, and from the boulevard one could look up to the windows of Noémi Janvier's flat. He checked an impulse to point it out; for, epoch-making as it was, it wasn't worth telling—to Rhoda. And with that admission he saw that forever there must be little reserves between himself and Rhoda Marple. It was not that she couldn't be made to understand—anything; but there were so many significant trifles in life that must be seized on the wing, that lost their point in the process of explanation.

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 So with the haunts of iniquity: there were plenty to which he might take her, but very few from which she would obtain the flavor she vaguely sought. He pictured a meeting between Rhoda and Marthe Lamielle and for the first time realized to the full how far from New England he had travelled.

There were scores of questions to be asked and answered, but after a little the process became almost mechanical to Grover, and his thoughts were sinking beneath Rhoda's wavelets, trying to find the direction of his own current, for it was impossible to keep the course merely by the landmarks. Her talk of regimental balls in Cairo, Easter in Rome, tennis at Mirren was strange in the ears of a young painter aglow with hopes of a future in the company of a girl whom he was illicitly stealing away from her illicit alliance with a sculptor and whose aunt's Fathers had had no God to speak of. At any moment Rhoda might turn to him and say, with the old air of reproach, Oh, Grover, don't tell me your mind is already on the ocean with your ships again. A rush of fondness for Rhoda and all the associations she brought back with her came into his veins, and he passed her hand through his arm and folded her fingers into his as they strolled up the hill toward the Etoile.

There they found an old-fashioned victoria and drove to the Hotel du Rhin, where the Pearns greeted Grover with an affectionate stiffness that touched and charmed him, and they all sat down to a good and

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 expensive lunch, a little intimidated by the malaise which only Paris can throw into the heart of true Bostonians.

And he had to improvise polite answers to their polite questions about himself and his painting. Couldn't they see some of his work? Grover thought of the unfinished sketch of a tomato salad on the easel in his shabby bedroom, and again knew to the full how far he had gone on the road of his destiny. Though none of his paintings were ready to be shown to these poor old dears, each stood for some milestone or other in the direction of self-development, and though his thoughts and emotions were equally not for their viewing, they were the thoughts and emotions of a man years and years older than the boy who had tried to parry their innocent questions, only twelve months ago, anent his plans for the future. Now he had to parry more than ever, for their eyes made inquiries which their lips were far too well-trained to utter. How do you spend your days and your nights? the eyes were asking. Have you successfully avoided the snares and pitfalls of this notorious city? Isn't it lonely for you? Or have you found some nice, refined, Christian companions?

All but Rhoda's. Rhoda's eyes, more melting than in the past, were saying, I know it; I know it; and I can bear to hear all about her in a moment, but let's prolong the illusion of the old ays a little,—then, when you're ready.

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 As sisterly as ever, Rhoda showed fewer signs of the old tendency to challenge and tease. Whereas she had once almost scoffed at his artistic leanings, his romantic notions, she now seemed to accept them without question. During his vacations from college she had taunted him with not being interested in "anything of less than five syllables;" now she seemed almost eager to hear his vocabulary. In fact she was the very first person who had ever looked at him with the trace of awe that the sight of a live artist is wont to arouse in the breast of a virgin, and there was something extremely ironic to him in that fact.

"I'm sure you know an awful lot of riff-raff," she said. "I'd love to meet some of them."

"If you condemn them before you even see them," he retorted, "you haven't much chance."

"I'll be as tough as I can," Rhoda assured him, pulling her hat over one eye to the horror of Miss Pearn, whose face nevertheless was a network of smiles that reminded Grover of the wrinkles on Mme. Choiseul's cold boiled milk.

Grover shook his head. "They'd see through the pose at a glance; riff-raff being very perspicacious—and, though you might not believe it, not at all tough."

"What are they then?"

"Like me, I suppose."

"Oh, that would be too nice," said Rhoda. "I couldn't bear it."

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 "Have I changed much?" he asked her later in the day, unable to hold in his curiosity.

The answer he half expected was that he had grown worldly-wise and rakish. The answer he got proved a shock to his vanity, for after a steady, testing regard, Rhoda told him he had changed in a way that made her want to mother him.

"You've lost your carefree smile," she said. "In its place you've got two little lines, and a sort of shadow, and the look of a man facing something grim. It's as if you were worried about something and don't know what."

You look so sad, honey,—Floss's plaint echoed in his brain. He had put it down to Floss's own excessive cheeriness that emphasized the contrast for her, but if it was apparent to Rhoda too, there must be just cause, and it oppressed him. For deep within himself he had wondered if he was a failure; and if you were a failure or were going to be, surely you would have the look of a man facing something grim! He longed to ask if his cheek still went the nice old way, but if he did, God alone knew what rivulets of mutual affection that would let loose, and with Olga curled up in his heart, and Rhoda, for all her bantering ways, so desperately sensitive without showing it, they might both go all to pieces right in the middle of Paris and never get properly put together again. The hardest problem in life, he reflected, is to know what to hold back and what not to.

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 After he had left her that evening, with the prospect of an appointment next day which he hoped to heaven wouldn't conflict with a telephone message from Montparnasse, he spent hours blowing smoke toward his ceiling and trying to disentangle his two personalities. For there were parts of him still alive, far more alive than he had suspected, that belonged to New England, and parts that belonged to Paris—and never the twain shall meet, he groaned.

Again he telephoned to the house on Montparnasse, but the concierge informed him that Mlle. Vaudreuil was stillaway. In desperation he asked to speak to M. Hellgren but was told that the sculptor had been summoned to Bordeaux again and would not return for several days. Again he left his message and repeated his wish to be notified upon Olga's arrival.

She might, he thought reproachfully, at least have written a few lines to tide him over the interval. But he had often noticed that to most people the act of writing was by no means as glib and facile as it was to himself. And just to give himself the satisfaction of not leaving his situation with Olga entirely in statu quo he wrote a short note, addressing it in care of the aunt at Enghien. Having done that, and having pictured her reception of it with a vividness that made its reception a reality in his own mind, he had the illusion that their plan was progressing, and that gave

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 him courage for the next encounter with Rhoda, whom he was to accompany on shopping and sightseeing rounds.

The Paris in which he appeared with Rhoda was the Paris reserved for travellers,—the smart shops, the fashionable theatres and restaurants, the Louvre,—and to satisfy her curiosity in regard to haunts of iniquity he took her to garish and expensive cabarets that he had never set foot in. There they saw many people from Hollywood. It hurt him that Rhoda should carry away images of him in settings so utterly unrepresentative of his life, but the alternative of taking her to his own haunts and presenting her to Marthe or the Casimirs or the ribald intellectuals was still riskier, for if he did that, heaven knew what distorted images Rhoda would carry away from it all. In the immortal phrase of his countrymen you had to be educated up to Bohemia before you could apprehend its essence, and though Rhoda was quick at the uptake she wasn't sufficiently in key with the phases of life that interested him to respond intuitively—the only kind of response that counted. If Floss had only been in town it would have been simple, for in Floss's peach-bloom salon Rhoda could have watched the daily parade of lost souls without being in any way committed, and gone home secure in the knowledge that she had seen more famous and infamous riff-raff at close quarters than any nice girl from Boston had ever been vouchsafed on the strength of an eight-day visit.

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 As it was, the glitter and impetus of Paris enchanted her, and Grover kept thinking up diversions which would postpone the inevitable "long quiet talk." He was afraid that if the opportunity arose he would tell Rhoda many things that were better left unsaid. And every day he spent with her was rendered the more exhausting by the strain caused by Olga's silence. No reply to his letter; nothing but the echo of workmen's hammers and chisels in Hellgren's house.

But under all the excitement to which Paris lifted Rhoda, there lay a sombre mood of which Grover caught occasional glimpses. If he had changed in the manner that Rhoda alleged, it was equally true that some analogous change had taken place in her. Some of the old crispness and sparkle had gone; in its place was a stillness, a meditative watchfulness which threatened to turn into melting looks and discouraged gestures.

"It's a great pity you have to leave so soon," said Grover as they sat at dinner on the eve of her departure. They had driven to the restaurant in the Place du Tertre to which Léon Vaudreuil had introduced him, and as it was late they had the room to themselves, except for a few people who couldn't possibly matter to anybody.

"I'd love to stay longer," she replied, and Grover wondered if secretly she weren't a little relieved to be sailing, "but I've been gone for months, and Father isn't at all well. When I'm at home there are little

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 things to do which he isn't conscious of. The servants don't see them. I don't quite know what it is I do do, or what it is I'll ever do,—but whatever it is, he misses it, though of course he would never complain."

"It's you he needs," said Grover, "and that's easily understood."

"Perhaps." In her tone was deprecation of the value of anything she might radiate, also a hint of chagrin that no one but her father should make demands upon it. It was as though Rhoda's old magnetism were in danger of growing weak for lack of suitable objects on which to exercise it. As Grover looked at her he fancied he could see qualities in her which he had seen in typical old maids of New England: delicately tinted flowers that had been passed by for more gorgeous blooms, retaining their fragrance and grace and fastidiousness, lovely but pathetic. They ended by going to lectures in nice old pairs, subscribing to movements, waiting for a war to break out. As he had long ago confessed to Rhoda, he had rather a penchant for them.

"Oh I need you too," he assured her, with a sudden deep sincerity. "Perhaps more than I know."

Her steady regard was on him, and her eyes were braced against another hurt.

"But don't you see, Rhoda dear, I need the other things too—things you call pagan?"

Tears were rolling down her cheeks, and he had the panicky feeling that tears always aroused in him.

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 "Oh, I'm not ashamed of them," she said through her grotesque little swallows and smiles. "They're only drops of water life squeezes out of you when you get too full—of feelings."

As he searched for comforting phrases Grover knew once again what ill-fitting garments words can be for the intricate emotions they foolishly attempt to clothe, and he quenched back the five-syllable things that rose to his lips, and stroked Rhoda's hand instead.

At the Gare St. Lazare next morning he found her a little pallid, but smiling. Standing with the Pearns amid a heap of supremely respectable luggage, Rhoda caught sight of him and came forward leading a young poodle.

"Look what Morty gave me!" she cried, proudly exhibiting the bewildered puppy. "I've always wanted a French poodle, and this is him!"

"Wait till he strikes Aldergrove. God help him when the airedales and chesapeakes sniff him and his French ways."

"They'll sniff you and your French ways too, if you're not careful. You'd better come back before they forget you."

"Oh!" he laughed, to conceal the depth of his feeling, "So long as you don't forget!"

"Well," said Rhoda, and the gates were opening and it would soon be time to say good-bye, "It's awful hard to remember somebody who never writes to you."

He promised to do better, and turned away from

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 the train with a feeling compounded of sadness and relief.

Walking rapidly toward a telephone booth, he called Hellgren's number, but there was no reply.

As the days went by his mind began conjuring up other aphorisms. If their No was never final, what about their Yes? When Olga had, on her own initiative, told him she loved him, it had never occurred to him that there could be the slightest ambiguity in the admission. Even now, after eight days of silence, he was prepared to swear by all that was sacred that she had meant it. It was the transparent sincerity of her tone rather than the words themselves that had sent him away in such elation and borne him up during this maddening interval. He was also prepared to swear that Olga had good reasons for not making a sign,—reasons that would prove simple once there was an opportunity for her to explain them. That Olga, after her last admission to him, should feel ill at ease in Oscar's house was what he could best understand in all the world, yet surely she must realize what a gone feeling it gave him to be left without news, without the reassurances that a newly born love must have to thrive upon.

He had revolved the wisdom of going out to Enghien, but apart from the fact that Rhoda's presence in Paris had made that plan difficult of execution, he

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 had a delicate scruple about intruding on Olga's privacy. Her recent air of abstraction implied that she was working out a problem; very likely she was still working it out,—no one knew better than he how long it takes to dig the tiniest scrap of truth from out the depths of oneself.

To silence his bootless thoughts he returned to his unfinished sketch of a tomato salad. The salad had long since been thrown out, having deteriorated into a condition unsuitable for posing, particularly in one's bedroom,—and he had only his memory to draw upon. Thus, he reflected, does one struggle up the long ladder to fame: while one wonders what the devil has happened to one's best girl, one probes into the recesses of a troubled memory to recapture the peculiar way in which a lettuce leaf curls round a slice of Bermuda onion.

There was a frantic yapping at the door of his bedroom, and he opened it to discover Mouche and Mme. Choiseul, with a petit bleu for him which had just been left by the facteur.

With a tight throat he tore it open, but it was not from Olga. It was from Mamie Mangum. Would he call in at her apartment this afternoon? There was something she wished to talk over with him.

What on earth could Mamie have to discuss with him? Hellgren? Surely Mamie couldn't be so fatuous as to misconstrue the man's plain decency to her!

But he lost no time in obeying the summons. Mamie

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 lived in an ugly street near the Conservatoire, within earshot of a hundred pianos. He found her in a studio littered with music, stretched upon a low divan in a dusty robe of purple, on her lap an Italian libretto of Thaïs, in which she was to make her first appearance in Naples. One half the room was as bare as a stage; the other half as cluttered as a Turkish bazar.

"Where is Olga?" she asked him as soon as he was seated in the chair to which she had motioned him.

The question sank into him like a rock.

"How should I know!" he temporized.

"I thought you might."

"They told me she was at her aunt's."

"Well she's not."

Grover felt numb, sitting in this cross between a workshop and a harem and staring at a strangely curt, strangely angry Mamie who might or might not know many things that were vital to him.

"What makes you so concerned about her?"

To his astonishment he saw tears in Mamie's eyes. He was so accustomed to her histrionics that he had lost sight of the fact that she might have a real feeung or two.

"My heart is broken," said Mamie.

To Grover it seemed merely that her vanity was a little bent, but he held his peace.

"My love was real," she went on.

"Who for?"

"Oh, don't be so dumb!"

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 "Oscar?"

Mamie nodded, and dried her tears.

"Well, don't you still?"

Again she nodded. Not a single gesture, Grover noted, impressed.

"What's it got to do with Olga?"

"She's gone, and he's nearly crazy."

"I thought he was in Bordeaux."

"He's back."

"Have you seen him?"

Mamie sat up on the divan, staring at him with a return of her tragic technique. "I met him by chance in the Bois. He was in a terrible state."

"What did he say?"

"Only what I've told you . . . I did what I could to comfort him."

Again the tears came into Mamie's eyes.

"But he wouldn't be comforted," Grover prompted, picturing Mamie's overtures.

"He said dreadful things. I'll hear them all my life. And broke away."

Grover was walking about the room, chafing at the fate that obliged him to learn these things at the hands of Mamie Mangum. His own course was clear, but he must find out what else Mamie knew.

"Did Hellgren mention any name?"

"No. Neither did I." She looked at him a moment as if claiming credit for at least that discretion. "But

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 I couldn't help thinking of you. And I was scared stiff."

"Why?"

Mamie crossed the room and began to touch herself up with yellow powder, reminding Grover of the days when children used to hold buttercups under each other's noses and chins to see if they liked butter. "You don't understand Oscar as I do," she said. "How could you! He feels more deeply than ordinary men. I couldn't think of you being felled by a hunk of marble and not warn you, could I!"

He had only one aim now, and that was to get to a telephone where he could talk in private. He picked up his hat and stick.

As he was leaving he had for Mamie, in the midst of his own bleak preoccupations, a final volt of compassion.

"Don't be too cast down," he admonished, and added in a tone which was not quite as ironical as it sounded, "You have your art, you know."

Mamie gave him an ineffable look, and from the landing he heard her playing the accompaniment to her favorite aria: Dis-mois que je suis belle—

Apparently it hadn't occurred to Mamie that if he were not responsible for Olga's absence, he might be experiencing emotions which if they were not so tempestuous as those of the bereaved lover might be at the least wildly disquieting.

He found a telephone booth and searched the Bottin

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 for the name of Olga's aunt. There was a delay of twenty minutes before a connection with Enghien could be established, and he sat at a sloppy table drinking cold coffee and cognac.

Despite his straining nerves, the voice was difficult to catch. Olga was not there, it was informing him. She had gone to San Sebastian.

When had she left?

On Wednesday.

Then, he reflected, with mounting hope, she had surely received his note.

"Could you let me have the address?" he asked. "I wish to send an important telegram."

"Hold the line a moment," came the voice. Then she read the words—even spelt them out, and with a weak "Merci, Madame," Grover let the receiver fall into its hook.

In the mirror behind the bar he caught sight of a face which looked like the face of a man seeing something grim. Then he crumpled up the paper on which he had begun to write the address, for he certainly had no message to send in care of the "Casa Peñaverde."

A few moments later he was plunging along the pavement of an unfamiliar street, weakly chanting the old troubled, meaningless refrain: Why did he die? Why did he die?

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 the arrival of the "fairly substantial" cheque, Grover paid Mme. Choiseul the hundred francs he owed her and packed his bags. He bought a ticket for Genoa, and from that point wandered southward through a series of little pink towns with mountains at their back doors and the sea fairly splashing up on their piazzas. The piazzas were studded with cheap marble Columbi, all pointing to America; but in his heart he almost wished that the Santa Maria had been wrecked.

His paint tubes and pencils and all the paraphernalia of his avocation had been left behind. They had become abhorrent to him. Abhorrent too was the very thought of a studio, of artists and art talk, "relations" and "values". He had long since found out "why Cézanne was so good," and he didn't care a straw.

Swimming in the calm blue sea, stretched on hubbly volcanic rocks while the sun baked him, he stared toward a horizon beyond which Rhoda was steaming her way home, her mind packed full of misapprehensions. The knowledge that an important lie, that two important lies were floating undenied on the sea, floating away beyond recall (for he would never have the courage to deny them) completed his misery. One of the lies was that he was a painter. The other was that he was deep in the joys of a pagan love affair. For a year he had boasted of his freedom, and all the vainglorious clatter was but the rattling of his chains.

All about him were robust young Italians, shouting

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 and splashing. Italians, he had always supposed, were devoted to art. Now he knew better: they were devoted to motorboats and tennis and jazz, with a devotion as whole-souled as that of the young Marples and Daggetts and Sipes of the North Shore. And how unutterably wise of them!

A young lady from Genoa, who lived at a shady hotel with means of support only too visible, rolled her dark eyes at him one evening on the street at Rapallo and walked toward a summer cafe which was built on a platform over the sea, and he followed her to her table as though he were the most accomplished flaneur in Europe. Together they drove in a carriage down the winding coast road to view the festa being celebrated in a neighboring village. Priests and children and fishermen paraded past them, all in robes of white and red, bearing the image of an agonizing saint and a silver Christ on the cross, while the band at the head of the procession blared out an ancient march of Sousa and Grover drew into his nostrils a pungent odor compounded of incense and a provocative scent of Bertelli's. The sky was ablaze with rockets shot off to the glory of God, and Grover kissed his new acquaintance straight on the mouth, as they drove back to the shady hotel, and when they awoke it was time for the morning swim. And I don't care if I drown, he said from the depths of his soul.

Tiring of one village he would journey on to another, trying new dishes, sending colored postcards to

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 Marthe and Mme. Choiseul, restlessly seeking distractions. Swimming helped to take the edge off his thoughts, and little glasses of cognac, and evening drives in the soft, cool airs that came in over the sea. He found himself in a town called Levanto and remained there partly out of weariness, partly because its isolation and miniature proportions appealed to him. The only distraction it offered was the friendliness of the inhabitants, and he played at being an Italian, with the furtive aid of a dictionary. One night, bored even with that expedient, he took out of his bag a book which he had saved from his collection at Harvard, always meaning to read it, always postponing the task, for it looked long and weighty. It was Keyserling's Travel Diary, and when he had started to read, there was no possible stopping. For a week he immersed himself in the wise, worldly subtleties of this chameleon-like intelligence, and when he was through he felt that he had passed an important landmark in his understanding of himself. For what the Baltic sage had most of all revealed to him was the fact that he, Grover Thanet, was a conservative and an aristocrat beyond redemption, for better for worse. This was both disconcerting and comforting: disconcerting because, if that were the case, how account for the creative urges he had fondly supposed himself a victim to; weren't all artists radicals? Comforting, because at least it was a definite fact about himself, and for months he had had only the moral

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 support of theories about himself which, one by one, had yielded to the obstructive facts of life. I and rubber crutches, he reflected.

Keyserling set in train a whole new category of speculations which blessedly crowded back the dreary thoughts he had brought with him from France. He found himself jotting down exciting little phrases on scraps of paper. One morning he leaped out of bed and wrote a poem, the first since the days when all his verses had begun, "Roses are red, violets are blue." On analysis it sounded like a bad Shakespearian sonnet and he tore it up, but he was obliged to admit that a new germination was taking place within him.

A few nights later he dreamed that he was a book, walking along a high windy cliff, down to a cobalt sea. The pages fluttered wildly, and he was afraid the letters would fall out of the words, which would have been a dreadful calamity, for he wished to let the letters dry in their words, like seeds in pods, for future planting.

Excited by his dream, he sat self-consciously before a pad of blank paper which he had run out of the hotel to buy. "Once in my antique youth," he began—but the poem got no further; it turned into a letter to Geoffrey Saint.

"I must finally confess," he wrote, "that I'm a Philistine. Nor am I ashamed of it now, though a few months ago I would have felt it a debasing admission. My justification is this, that while the doggedly

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 artistic souls are forcing their growth in a hothouse of theories and producing monstrous crimson flowers that get into horticultural exhibitions, the world doesn't really depend on them for its agricultural progress. Hardy perennials go their own sturdy way. It's at least debatable whether even the great artists lead civilization in the way it must go. Very likely they are merely on the edge of the procession, like the clowns that caper about the sidelines of the circus, affording diverting and perspective-giving contrast to the grave and solid elephants and lions. Artists are useful, in that their subconscious is more sensitively attuned, more articulately responsive to the current which animates them, as it animates all humanity. They are the flecks of foam on the crests of the wave of civilization; by watching the lacey white patches you can determine the direction of the winds. It is naive to assume that the foam leads the wave."

As he reread the letter, he hoped that Geoffrey wouldn't take him too literally. For, he reflected, I'm not so hardy, however damn perennial I may be,—nor yet am I grave and solid. If I'm not exactly an artist, perhaps I'm by way of being a philosopher; you can be that, and be conservative and aristocratic.

"What I'm driving at," he added in a postscript, "is that I'm going back to get a job."

The idea hadn't even occurred to him until he hastily scribbled down the fact, then he recognized it as an inspiration.

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 He packed his bags again and bought a ticket for Paris, simply because there seemed no other city for the son of the Professor Thanet to go to. All my things are there, he excused himself, and I guess my soul is still flying about the ville lumière, with whatever wings it's got left.

The endless tunnels, the heat and the dust, the discomfort of trying to wedge oneself between German tourists who were ever so grave and solid, and forever slowly nibbling at cheese or cakes or grapes out of paper bags that crackled and never got empty, but were merely filed for future reference!

At Ventimiglia there was the usual paralyzing wait for the customs inspection, and an inadequate supply of porters. As usual he was one of the last to be waited on, and as he came away from the shed, trying to remember the respective pockets for his keys and his money and his ticket and his passport he found himself stemming the tide of an influx of passengers from a train bound in the opposite direction.

Keeping an eye on his particular porter, and jostling his way through, he came face to face with a woman, the sight of whom caused him to stop dead in his tracks. In the next moment she had noticed him too, and also stopped dead, with a comic precision. Then he fought his way toward her, for it was Sophie Scantleberry, and the tall ruddy man beside her was her husband.

They exchanged what hurried remarks they could

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 crowd into the few moments at their disposal. The Scantleberries were on their way to join a yachting party bound for Greece.

Grover's eyes fell on the open passport in Sophie's hand.

She hid the photograph from view with an odd smile. "I don't mind their making me look ugly," she said with a nervous acerbity that masked heaven knew what recollections, "but I do hate them to make me look common!"

Grover's train was ready to leave and he had to hurry away.

A gay, mournful tune was running through his head: Let's talk about my sweetie now—

When he alighted from his cab in the rue Truffaut the laundress, mending shirts in the sunshine, as though loath to sit indoors while even the illusion of summer remained, looked up with her bright hard smile. Mme. Choiseul wept for pleasure, and Mouwche conscientiously smelt him, withholding a verdict.

In a sense it was like arriving in a new city, for he had been envisaging a new life for himself, and what was adventure but the act of verifying your imaginative charts! Paris was to discover, all over again.

With his bags unpacked and his belongings set to rights again in the shabby old room, he arrived at an. Sinking into the familiar chairs was to

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 sink into the familiar thoughts, and there was the little terra cotta Voltaire, grinning more cynically than ever. Olga was here too, peering at him from every corner, now the Columbine, now the sphinx, then the practical girl cracking eggs for an omelette, or the shy girl at the foot of Hellgren's stairs, but eventually the stony-faced young woman perched on Janvier's piano. That first impression of her was the one he always ended by confronting. If one only had the sense, he reflected, always to abide by first impressions!

Aside from the question of moral salvation, there was now a material necessity for finding a job, for his funds, like his clothes, were at an unprecedentedly low ebb, and he needed, as he expressed it to himself, at least one of everything. At Levanto the project had seemed as simple and logical as any episode in an Alger book of pluck and luck; here, in the old prison, it seemed a forlorn hope. For of all the men in Paris whose acquaintance he could claim, what one of them could give him so much as a hint? The only face that kept recurring in his thoughts, smilingly, was that of a young American in the bank where he went to cash his cheques; and grasping at the hope held out by this smile before all his good intentions should go into the making of a new pavement for hell, he picked up his hat and walked out of the house.

A new fear had now got hold of him. Though, as heaven so well knew, he would never be a painter,—neither a Casimir nor, and the thought yielded a bitter

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 sort of satisfaction, a Peñaverde,—ten to one he looked far too aesthetic to suit even the most tolerant employer. He had never entered an office without feeling the inappropriateness of his background. And now he would know for sure whether the pool he had dipped into had dyed him.

All he had in common with the genial American cashier was Harvard,—they dimly recalled having seen each other there,—but that was enough to secure him fifteen minutes conversation in private. In the end the cashier invited him to call at the apartment he shared with three other Americans, one of whom "might have an idea." One idea, thought Grover, ought not to be too severe a tax on the pooled brains of four.

He stopped at the barber's to have the chief badge of his bohemianism shorn to a more pragmatic scale, and after dining alone made his way to the address of his countrymen.

He was directed to an apartment that reminded him of a dormitory. One of the bachelors was playing the piano, and another was taking a shower-bath, their combined din being pierced by a third young man's loud elucidation of the latest international loan. Grover's friend was smoking a pipe with his feet on the mantel and a copy of the Saturday Evening Post on his knees. It was just like the Y. M. C. A.

Grover saw the role he would have to play,—he had done it often enough in the Harvard Union,—and

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 before an hour had elapsed he had produced enough signs of being neither a genius nor a moron to set at rest any doubts that his aura might have roused in the four average breasts.

The outcome of the visit was a letter to an attache at the American embassy, where his accomplishments and credentials seemed to carry weight. Here there was no frantic stress laid on hundred-per-centism; personal quality was rather the criterion. The interview was pleasant and resulted in a half promise. Certain officials must be consulted, the budget of an overworked department looked into,—in short they would let him know.

For several days he waited, encouraged by the smooth progress of his first intrusion into the arena of public affairs, marvelling that a mere way of talking should open doors which he had always supposed it difficult to force, yet at the same time a little depressed at the prospect of sacrificing his precious independences to the deadly machine kept going by the countless pale young men and women who had glanced up at him from the desks to which fate had chained them.

Then came a courteous letter offering him a post as assistant to a dogmatic old gentleman who seemed to have spent his life as a monkey-wrench in the well-oiled machine of diplomacy. When Grover reported for service, he found a desk cleared for him before a smoking fireplace, where he was handed a stack of galley proofs, in English and French, setting forth an

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 appallingly detailed record of infractions of international law. Every fish that had ever been caught in an alien net seemed to be down on the list. And I'm one of the millions of them, he was thinking, as he realized that it had become, forever, his conservative and aristocratic duty to pepper these soggy reports with semicolons and circumflex accents. This, he reflected, is what you get for not being an artist; this constitutes the dignity of labor—oh, Mr. Carlyle!

But when he had outgrown the feeling of intrusion with which he had at first entered the hive, he experienced a sensation which was in many ways agreeable. For a great weight rolled away when one was reduced to the simple necessity of fulfilling mechanical orders, with all the responsibilities of the day left to superior officers.

But by Christmas time the routine had grown irksome, the statistics tedious in the extreme, the relaxation intolerable. In intervals between his monotonous tasks, he caught himself listening again, as of old, to the whispered clamors within himself, desperately trying to find the locus of a simmering and effervescing that could only, there was no doubting it, be attributable to a creative mutiny. A year ago a similar interior rumble had filled him with eager elation; now it filled him with dread. Bit by bit he was forced to the acknowledgment that he had again played himself false. The avalanche that had occurred within him at the discovery of Olga's betrayal had carried away,

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 along with the emotional debris, a number of the faiths that were allied to his faith in her. Simply because she whom he had enshrined had proved false, he had distrusted all the other pedestals. His disgust with the studios had grown into a repugnance for paint, and that, as a matter of fact, was perhaps as well, for even the indulgent Casimir had never credited him with more than a nice little talent, which was certainly not enough to warrant a life of torture in its cultivation.

But a nice little talent in one field was not necessarily the final verdict; in other fields he might find unguessed resources. The mere fact that he was an incorrigible romantic bore witness to the play of great imaginative energy. If this energy could only be canalized, what hydraulic power might it not be capable of? At long last it occurred to him that he had behaved like a coward.

It was even possible, he argued, though his painfully convalescing heart rejected the imputation, that, like poor Mamie, his vanity had been the chief victim of the spring disaster. With half cruel levity he had tossed Mamie her "art"; and now, without levity, but with a trace of the cruelty with which he so often excoriated himself, he offered himself the same bitter prescription. You set out to save your soul, and you won't be satisfied till you do. But you'll never save it by putting commas in a list of fish that were pinched off the coast of Nova Scotia in the year 1884.

Yet his distaste for painting was rooted. No effort

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4 Directors of the East India Company to send out an experienced engineer officer, Major Charles Kuipe, to report on the state of the fortifications His short and pithy report, given below, will show that in 1743 the fort was hardly entitled to its name.

"Major Charles Knipe having surveyed the fortifications of the town on the west side from Charles' Point to Queen's Point, delivers in a report.

 * "To the Honourable Richard Benyon, Esq.,
 * "President and Governor.

"In obedience to your Honour's commands, I have taken a survey of your city of Madraspatam from Charles' Point to the Queen's Point, being that part of the fortifications, as it is called, which faces towards the island; but I must take the liberty to assure you it is no fortification at all, but rather an offensive than defensive wall to your garrison. Was it not for the support it has from the several outhouses of the inhabitants which are all built against it through the whole extent above-mentioned, it could not stand, nor was it more than sufficient for a garden-wall when first erected. As to the river that runs by it, that neither is any addition to the strength of your works, but rather a nuisance to the town; for I observe in every part of it, it is continually forded at less than two feet deep. The plan laid down for enlarging your city and carrying a new fortification across the island from Charles' Point to Queen's Point, above mentioned, I have by your Honour's direction very carefully examined in regard to a foundation, by making small wells of considerable depth from the surface, and by boring several feet deeper in the bottom of each of them through the whole extent of the intended fortification, and find the soil is clay and sand capable of sustaining any weight, especially if assisted with a few wells under the foundation near the river's side, where it is a little spungy. As to the river, I will engage to turn that quite off from your town at a very small expense, and supply its


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 of will could induce him to open his boxes again, and the historic portfolio lay prone and inert in a dusty corner of his bedroom.

Ever since the night he had dreamed he was a book the idea of literature had gnawed at him; but the field of letters was so vasty that any vision he could evoke of himself threading a path through it was rather terrifying,—a tiny figure receding among the trees. He had seen so many books ranged on the stacks of the Harvard library that it seemed a positive misservice to the world to increase the plethora. Besides, he had nothing to say that wasn't best expressed in a sigh.

Yet there were moments when, for sheer peace of mind, he was obliged to get rid of his clamorous thoughts on paper. Paragraphs and pages would eventuate, which though they fairly indited themselves,—despite desperate halts while the thought untangled,—proved upon analysis to be nothing but what Walter Bagehot or George Santayana had once said in a single sentence. And there you are, he scornfully told himself: your memory plays tricks on you, and if you were to write a whole novel you'd probably end by discovering that it was merely Bleak House all over again, or Joseph Vance, or Niels Lyhne.

For all which, he was engaged on a story which, to his surprise, and gradually to his excitement, gave promise of growing into a novel. He scarcely realized this himself until one afternoon in January, when he

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 was walking absent-mindedly along the Avenue de l'Opéra and encountered Floss, whom he had not seen for many months. With a genuinely grieved air she complained of his defection, beaming fondly and forgivingly in the end.

"What you been doing, honey?" she inquired.

And just for something to say, he had wearily replied, "Oh, writing a novel about how tragic life is!"

Which was the first acknowledgment of the fact that he had made even to himself, for no matter how zealous he might be in his introspections, the truth about the most obvious of his acts usually popped out from some subconscious source.

But he did not accept Floss's urgent invitations. Only by slow and careful construction, brick on brick, could he hope now to build up his intellectual freedom and his right to dissipate his energies at the bidding of a curiosity that led one straight into some bog or other.

The encounter with Floss, however, made him vaguely restless, bringing back, as it did, the vivid recollection of sights, sounds, and flavors that had so complicated, yet undeniably so enriched his experience. The restlessness culminated in a sudden desire to revisit Marthe. He had not seen her since a spring evening shortly before Rhoda's appearance in Paris, though she had often been in his mind. In fact, when he reviewed his life in this kaleidoscope of a city, it seemed that Marthe, poor drab whose closeness to the earth had

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 taught her some of its profoundest secrets, was the steadiest light of them all. She asked nothing and took nothing, yet had never failed him. And we are all constituted so selfishly, he reflected, that we must have at least one person who never fails. Usually it's a mother; sometimes it's a dog.

He arrived at the cafe at the hour of dusk. Familiar faces were there; two or three voices greeted him politely. But Marthe was absent, and after he had taken a seat in her old corner and given his order, Mme. Annoni, climbing down from the caisse, advanced with an air of mystery to talk to him.

"Have you heard?" she asked, and Grover's heart grew cold with dread.

Marthe was in an insane asylum.

"For several weeks," Madame explained, "we noticed something strange. She would be weeping one day and laughing drunk the next. Then one night she came running in, in her stocking feet. Figurez-vous, Monsieur—correct in every detail, hat—coat—and stocking feet! And screaming, and laughing, and waving her arms-and a crowd of people outside the door. When the agents arrived she was playing a violin that she had snatched from the top of the piano—scraping it horribly, without sense, and as earnestly as though she were giving a recital in the Salle Gaveau."

Grover was weak with sorrow and pity and loneliness.

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 "One of the last times she was here," Mme. Annoni went on, as if any further detail were needed to fix the dark dye of the tragedy, "she showed us your postcard from Italy. If you only knew how proud she was. I read it to her."

Incongruous new thought—Marthe couldn't even read!

"And only last week her old vicomte came back," added Mme. Annoni. "He was struck all of a heap when I told him." She shook her head with a great sigh. "Ah, she was no ordinary girl, that one!"

Looking with cold eyes upon Mme. Annoni's display of compassion, Grover recalled occasions on which the lady's relentlessness had fastened itself on Marthe as indiscriminately as it had singled out many another poor wretch who was temporarily unable to pay for his sinister cheer. On the whole Marthe had been a good customer, one of the best; she had been virtually a part of the goodwill of the business, and had attracted clients of distinction, including a romantic old vicomte; moreover she had had the grace to make a spectacular ending, thereby providing rich food for the plebeian imagination of her outcast friends. Mme. Annoni might well sigh.

He learned that Marthe had passed through the first violent stage of her malady. The English Miss, a dull but faithful soul whose acquaintance Grover had made on one of the Friday nights that she had reserved for Marthe, had offered to be responsible for the patient,

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 but her offer could not be accepted by the State. As there was no husband, or relative, Marthe could not be released.

"Could I help?" asked Grover, rather helplessly wondering whether the guarantee of a yearly sum would suffice.

Mme. Annoni was of the opinion that it was a hopeless situation. But she gave him the address of the institution.

On the Wednesday afternoon set aside for visitors, Grover obtained leave from his office and undertook the lugubrious journey. Outside the fortifications there was a long delay in transferring to a second tramway, and he stood shivering in the snow, armed with a mournfully festive basket of chocolate and fruits.

There were many buildings and it was not easy to find the right one, for every door seemed locked, and his knockings brought no response. Eventually he found his goal and an alert-eyed Sister piloted him through a long bare corridor from which he could see into bedrooms occupied by staring, furtive creatures. One woman brushed back her hair and ran from the sight of him with a scream of terror; another peered silently through the doorless opening, craning first her neck and then half her body, swinging back and forth like an ape. A third, a gray-haired old witch with dead eyes and an unearthly grin, skipped ahead of them like a little girl, twirling an imaginary rope.

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 The Sister, guessing the horror he felt at the thought that Marthe should be housed with such obvious lunatics, offered him some slight reassurance as she ushered him into an apartment that looked like a schoolroom. "Lamielle," she said, startling him with the official appellation for poor Marthe, "should really be in another section, for she is quite herself again, but they are so crowded there isn't room."

"Will she remain lucid?" asked Grover, half dreading that his voice would echo in these precincts and come back to him in a form as hideous as the meaningless sounds he had been hearing.

The Sister shook her head and turned away, closing the door and leaving him to stare at a lithochrome of Saint Geneviève coming to the rescue of a beleaguered Paris.

After a long wait during which he hadn't the courage to sit down, he heard footsteps and a voice,—strong, pleasant, commanding,—then something that sounded like a scuffle. When the door opened he saw a strange, almost dumpy little figure shrinking behind the white apron of a tall old woman who was evidently the head nurse. Dressed in a blue mother-hubbard that looked as though it might have been made of mattress ticking, with her thin brown hair drawn tightly back,—where were the soft golden curls?—and her mouth almost empty of teeth,—had she bashed them all out in a frenzy?—Marthe let herself be coaxed and pushed into the room, to the accompaniment of re-

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 assuring words from the old woman, who, as a final argument, said to her, "Just see what a pretty basket your kind friend has brought you!"

She might have been speaking to a bashful child, and in truth Marthe looked at the same time like a little girl and a little old woman. Her age, which had always baffled him, was no longer a secret. Marthe was not a day under forty.

Her confidence was gaining strength and she came a few steps forward. He noticed that the white collar and cuffs of her uniform were in some way which he couldn't define a little more attractive than those of the other inmates he had seen. The tidiness and freshness that had always characterized her had survived the ordeal, whatever else had been engulfed and forever swept away.

He took Marthe's hand and they sat down on the bench by a window which overlooked an acre of barren ground, wet and cold with half melted snow. The old woman had retired, leaving the door ajar.

As if in a dream, for he was too numb for feeling, Grover made talk and gradually drew Marthe into it. She asked questions in a voice that had only an echo of the old resonance,—questions about Mme. Annoni and her friends at the cafe, and Italy.

"It's so pretty there," she commented. "Far prettier than France." She was taking at their face value the wild colorings of his postcards.

"They won't let me leave," she informed him, with

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 a stoical sadness that opened a window on all the unutterable despair of life.

"But they are good to you?" he suggested. From the manner of the two Sisters it was clear that Lamielle was a favorite.

She shrugged her shoulders. "It's dull. All day. Every day. We get up at six! . . . Sometimes they let us work. We take turns. This morning I peeled the potatoes—look!"

Her soft white fingers were stained and scarred, and she was smiling with a hint of her old gaiety, a travesty of it—the poor empty mouth!

He told her that her old friend, the vicomte, had called at the cafe, and her eyes glistened.

"Le pauvre diable!" she said.

When he offered her the basket she drew back, all her embarrassment returning. The head nurse came into the room again as a reminder that their time was up, and suddenly Marthe reached into the basket and began plying her with the contents.

"Tenez! Tenez!" she urged.

But the old Sister protested gently. "They are all for you, my dear, and you shall have some of them each day. I will keep them in a safe place." Turning to Grover she explained. "Miss Barrett brought her some presents for her birthday, and she had given them all away before we knew it. She's a naughty child."

Though this was said in banter it brought a hurt look into Marthe's eyes, and she again sought protec-

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 tion in the old woman's apron, hiding her face from Grover's sight.

But when she saw it was time to say good-bye, she came running forward, and clung to him. They both accompanied him to the door, and the nurse allowed Marthe to stand on the stoop.

Once more she clung to him, kissing him good-bye despairingly, as though it might be forever.

"Will you come again?" she finally asked, her voice trembling with the dread of a refusal.

He promised, and at length broke away.

He kept turning back, to see her standing there, in front of the old nurse, her arm raised high as she waved to him, like a child, the tears streaming down her face. Marthe, who had proclaimed that all women were selfish! The elusive, virginal quality that had first attracted him to her shone through and enveloped her broken body in a protective halo.

At the end of the lane he turned for a final farewell. Her handkerchief still fluttered, though the shapeless mother-hubbard was almost indiscernible through the fast falling snow.

As he waited for the tram Grover wondered what the quixotic vicomte would say if he were to discover that for all these years he had been stroking a wig!

He half guessed that the old man would understand, for, reflected Grover, life is not what it seems, and it's only romantics who really penetrate the appearance. It seemed to him that the old vicomte, making his

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 pilgrimages to the dingy cafe to pay homage to an optical illusion, was a type of all the poets and all the artists, of all the souls whose mission it is to transform the bogs of life into elysian fields for the feet of those who by keeping the faith have earned the right to walk in them.

Mondays come at well-ascertained intervals," he wrote to Geoffrey, "they always take me by surprise." And the explanation was that, while he had schooled himself to the rigors of his daily schedule, his week-ends, bringing as they did a surcease from the breaches of international law, were becoming more and more precious. A new spring was stealing into the city, nature was creeping over the cold pavements and up into the farthermost tips of the trees, and here he was two years older than he had been on another spring day when, walking across Boston Common with Rhoda Marple, he had heard little tunes from the Rondes de Printemps scuttle through his mind and come out on his lips in the form of an unbreathed ejaculation: If this were only Paris!

In the last few weeks his story had taken him firmly by the throat. Not that it was getting itself written;

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 but it was nibbling incessantly at his consciousness, waking him up in the middle of the night, sending him off into reveries in the midst of his diplomatic labors, and, as soon as a week-end came around, driving him away to Rouen or Versailles or any one of a dozen refuges that his increased income had made possible. He would set out with a handbag and many sheets of white paper,—the old portfolio having again come into its own (it won't be denied a future, thought Grover),—but the moment he was installed in his hotel the story flew back to town, leaving him alone to divert himself as best he might.

It was to be an ironic story, yet it kept turning solemn, which made for the utmost confusion. Moreover, just as in the old days he had got words when he was trying to create pictures and his colors all ran into a muddy puddle, so now he got pictures whenever his mind groped for a recalcitrant phrase. His tragic episodes, when he reread his script, bordered perillously on the comic, and his attempts at humor were dire. Talent, he concluded in discouragemem, isn't even half the battle; unless you define talent as the ability to cultivate talent. The injustice of it all was the fact that he hadn't even wanted to write the foolish story; the story was rather trying to write him! It had foisted itself on him, and he felt that that being the case, and he doing his very best to oblige it, it might at least pose for him without wriggling. To keep it smoothly running, to fit one part noiselessly into the

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 other, was beyond his technical resource. An essay or a poem accommodated you by going in whatever direction you chose; but a novel had its own ideas of direction, and refused to let you know what they were; to find out you had to listen for hours, with your ear on your heart.

Even the parts that sounded professional were signally lacking in spontaneity, whereas any masterpiece must, to his notion of it, have the ring of an impromptu fait à loisir. His poor dear story was all leisure, and very little impromptu. The best he could honestly claim for it was that it was a safety valve. What he hoped for it he scarcely dared to admit.

"I'm becoming so literary," he added, in his letter to Geoffrey, "that I require a pencil at the table, along with my knife and fork." But he did not add, as he might have done, that the wayward pencil was as like as not to use up its energy for the morning in a caricature of the bearded man at the next table.

If this were only Aldergrove! he caught himself sighing one Sunday afternoon as he lolled on a bank beside the historic Marne. In his pocket was an unexpected letter from Rhoda Marple, breaking a long silence. Rhoda had grown weary of her social rounds, and had gone into her father's office,—it was almost as though she had independently come to a conclusion analogous to his own.

"A few years ago," her letter had run, "every girl used to talk about a career. Nowadays they talk about

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 jobs, and it's far more honest. I decided I needed a job, so I took one. Not at the very bottom 'to learn the business,' because I think that's all bunk. There's no reason why you can't learn a business from the top, if you're that kind of person. I've made Father see it, which reverses all his notions of life, a very dangerous experience at his age, poor darling. Anyhow he's given me two raises already."

Rhoda's letter and especially what lay between the written lines,—the most important part of any letter!—blinded him to the fresh green beauty of the banks of the Marne, All he saw was the fresh green of Aldergrove, the deep red of the peonies and the crisp salty foam like the whites of eggs evaporating on the shore.

On his return to Paris he instinctively wandered into cafes that he had long avoided, as though by a return to bohemianism he could prove to himself that the existence of a conventional New Englander would bore him to death. But in the old haunts the old pain returned, bringing a conviction that he was almost structurally detached from the aims of the young moderns, even young moderns whose productions he deeply admired. I can't afford it yet, he told himself,—by which he meant that he might jeopardize his crystallization into the conservative, aristocratic identity that Keyserling had inadvertently done him the service of pointing out to him.

At the same time, the reaction to Rhoda's letter,

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 plus the hour in Léon Vaudreuil's old rendezvous, made him chafe more than ever at the restrictions of his job. That his efforts had been honest was proved by the fact that he, too, had been given a "raise"—not two, like Rhoda, and not a large one, but at least a token of merit.

He had outgrown the old sharp torments, though he had also outgrown the old sharp ecstasies, the thrills of surprise, the daily shocks of interest as he unwrapped little packages of life and found the contents utterly different from what he had been led to guess by the shape of the bundle. In their place was a steadier, less wavy undulation, representing a mean of contentment sinking now and again to sombre meditation, rising now and again to a glow that he could only describe to himself as mental health. For a time his moods were shadowed by the fate of Marthe. He had returned to the asylum one day only to be denied admission. Marthe had relapsed—this time beyond hope.

Early to bed and early to rise—what a milk and water fate, he was thinking. Yet he stuck to his job, perhaps with the idea of proving to himself that he had the endurance, though tempting visions came to him of peaceful spring and summer days by the sea, in Normandy or on the riviera, writing, writing, spinning the story out of himself like an indefatigable spider. Late to bed and late to rise makes a man—heaven knows what, but at least he could promise him-

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 self to be consistently late at both ends, and the shade of Benjamin Franklin, who had loved his France as much as Grover was learning to love it, despite its concealed weapons, would wink a condoning eye.

But three weeks of vacation were awaiting him, and he spent them at Biarritz in August, and repaired promptly to the villa which Floss maintained at that resort. Despite the ugly proximity to San Sebastian,—a fact he had quite overlooked when accepting the invitation—he saw no sign of Olga and her Spaniard, no sign of the Spaniard's abandoned Marchesa; indeed Floss seemed to have culled a fresh bouquet of noxious human blooms, and her cool, breezy drawing-rooms were alive with riff-raff: actresses with scratchy, alcoholic voices; well-tailored gigolos with their eyes on the main chance; counts and marquises who had come by their titles in ways that nobody was sufficiently interested to challenge; cinema stars who walked out in the hope of waylaying the King of Spain; and lewd old men who had nothing left but their eyes and their pocketbooks.

Grover gave the story a rest and spent a good part of his vacation in a luxurious coma. It surprised him to find that now, incapable of being disturbed in his notions of how life should behave, he moved in the half world with an ease that had never been possible in the days when he had been on the watch for miracles; and this assurance served as a handle by which he was drawn into conversations and excursions, made

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