“Broken Music”

“BROKEN MUSIC”

By Phyllis Bottome, Author of “The Imperfect Gift,” “Crooked Answers,” “The Common Chord,” etc.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK:
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS, CAMBRIDGE
1914

Printed in Great Britain

DEDICATION

“To the Memory of the Siegfried Idyll”

PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR.

The material for the French life in this book I owe entirely to a friend, without whose knowledge and assistance it would not have been written, but whose name I am not at liberty to disclose.

The faults of the work are my own, but the merit, if there is any merit, is his; if there is not, the misfortune is his as well as the public’s, since an abler hand should have made something of the material he placed at my disposal.

The actual characters are not, as children say of fairy tales, “true”; but many of them belong to that system of parallel cases which runs side by side with the truth.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

“BROKEN MUSIC”

CHAPTER I

“SO she’s sent for you too, has she?” said the doctor. Of course he knew that Miss Prenderghast must have sent for Monsieur le Curé as she had sent for the doctor himself, for neither of them would have gone to the Castle uninvited. They would have cheerfully borne with many things for the sake of Jean D’Ucelles, but they would not have gone uninvited to see his aunt, especially not for déjeuner.

The Curé hesitated; if he could have made a mystery out of his invitation he would have done so; he loved mysteries quite as much as the doctor loved probing them, but he was not quite such an adept at inventing them—he preferred those which had been already invented for him.

“She intimated that she desired to see me,” he cautiously replied. “I could have refused, but she is, as we all know, alas! a Protestant, and as such her soul is in hourly peril. I said to myself: ‘Perhaps this is an awakening to the truth.’ It’s true I should have preferred to go up to the Castle after déjeuner. It is a strange thing—I have often remarked it—that Protestants enjoy neither the fruits of the spirit nor the fruits of the earth. It was not so always at the Château. I can remember well enough in the late Baron’s time what a table she kept—the poor young English wife—even in his absence. She was not born a Catholic, it is true; but she became one. She spared no expense, and she had a great respect for the clergy. She was always telling me to take care of myself. She had a cook trained in Paris.”

“Perhaps she was able to train her cook,” said the doctor. “The more pity she couldn’t train her husband—the poor Baron, he was always a wild one. I had hoped the marriage would steady him, but it never did! How well I remember his saying to me: ‘You believe in nature, then, Monsieur; so do I. She has made the plants to keep still, but men she has made to move about—do not trouble yourself, then, that I fulfil my destiny!’ He was going to Paris, of course; he always was. I remember it was before Monsieur Jean’s birth. I had ventured to implore him to remain. I knew it was a liberty, but what would you? The Baronne was in a very delicate condition. I feared that she had anxieties, there was much talk about the Baron’s long absences—always without her, you understand, but not always, I fear, without others—and I had much sympathy with the poor lady, alone, and in a strange land. She was very young, too, and neurotic; she wanted to die.” The doctor blew his nose.

“That was a sin,” said the Curé severely. “I can hardly believe that of Madame; she never mentioned the fact to me. I think you must be exaggerating.”

“Bah!” snapped Dr. Bonnet. “I am not a priest. I have some experience of women; she was in love with her husband. English women are droll; it is a great mistake, I find, this love of the husband—it leads nowhere. However, it is not so easy to die when one is twenty-five and has a man of science against one, and then when Monsieur Jean was born it was all another story! The Baron sent a telegram in the best of taste, and came down later with the Comte and Comtesse D’Ucelles to the christening.”

The Curé nodded.

“It was a magnificent christening,” he said. “I myself officiated. There was talk of the Bishop of the Diocese, but Madame was firm; she said I should be the one to make her son a Christian, as I had made his mother Catholic. Yes, yes, doubtless she is with the Blessed Saints—the little English lady—and I hope the Baron too, though of that we cannot be quite so sure.”

Monsieur le Curé made the sign of the cross and looked very grave. There was every reason why he should, for the Baron D’Ucelles had shot himself through the head five years ago—two years after his wife’s death. It was natural that he should regret her. She had spent six months in giving him what he wanted, and thirteen years in not giving him what he didn’t want. She would have made an ideal wife for any man. Still it was not altogether on her account that he had followed her to the grave. The late Baron had been a little extravagant both with his money and with his life, and when he had at length discovered that he would shortly become a helpless paralytic on a very small income, he had decided to take the only means left him to avoid these issues. He had left behind him only Ucelles itself and two small farms, which was all that could be saved for his son out of his once handsome inheritance. His family said that this was what came of having married an English woman without a dot.

“There is one thing,” said the Curé, after a pause, “that I have never quite understood, and this is why Monsieur Jean should have been brought up by this English relation?”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“I too have wondered,” he said. “But what will you? The Comte, his guardian, married a rich wife of the bourgeoisie, and they have a large house in Paris and a big income; they have no children of their own. What more likely, it would seem, than that they should adopt Monsieur Jean? In this world, so I take it, what is likely does not happen. Instead, one fine day this English aunt arrives, who knows nothing of our tongue or of our ways, and nothing—it would seem—of children, it is to her, then, that they entrust our little Baron. For myself, I am a philosopher, I have no theories—all I believe is that in the long run nature has her way, and her way is, perhaps, the best; at any rate it is the only one I know.”

“I have always endeavoured to guard him against her errors,” said the Curé; and indeed he had done his best. He had baptized Jean, he had taught him his catechism, and prepared him for confirmation and for his first communion; he had also taught him a little Latin, a great deal of theology, and what he thought was literature. He really believed that Jean thought so too, but then he had watched Jean so carefully and incessantly for twenty years that he knew nothing about him at all. The doctor, who had not seen nearly so much of Jean, understood him a great deal better. He had kept a fresher eye for change.

Both men were silent after this. Little St. Jouin lay in the broiling sun behind them, a small, huddled town in the ancient stubble-fields of the plain. The broad white road, through which life flashed by in swift, infrequent modern traffic, divided it from a fashionable watering-place on the one side and from a commercial seaport on the other. But nobody ever stopped at St. Jouin, there was no reason why they should; it had nothing rare enough about it to ensure its ruin and there was no one to realize that in being so near modernity it had altogether escaped it. Certainly the two figures that plodded along the broad white road had no such fancies; they had no fancies at all. They had lived in St. Jouin nearly all their lives. Monsieur le Curé in particular, with his high, narrow head and irritable, unseeing eyes (the kind of eyes that are always glancing about, driven by a suspicion that there is something wrong to be observed, and overlooking everything else), was not likely to approve of fancies. Why should he? his religion was sufficient for him. He was the most important person in St. Jouin; there was no unbelief there (in spite of the newspapers) and very little faith. Everybody went to church, so that their lives were always under the Curé’s eyes; only their souls escaped him.

The doctor had his ideas, of course, but he was terribly scientific; he had spent a year in Paris thirty years ago, and he took in a Radical newspaper. He thought he was a red-hot Socialist and a cynic, but he was really a very kind-hearted man and treated all his poorest patients free of charge, only he was a little impatient about what he did not understand. He was quite sure that what did not appeal to him personally was either old-fashioned or new-fangled, and when he talked about progress, he meant his own ideas.

The great bell at the Château rang out the hour of noon; it seemed to shake the hot air round them and to keep the silence listening to its deep reverberations. The Curé stopped, crossed himself, and repeated his Ave with bowed head. The doctor, who was a stout man, was glad of the pause, but lest his friend should suppose that he was putting it to a religious purpose, he whistled—at least he tried to; but he was too much out of breath to make a success of it.

Through the opening in the trees beyond them Ucelles itself appeared. It was a long, low house, with a steep, grey roof, in which tiny round windows were thickly set. At a distance it still looked, what it had once been, the chief mansion in the district—the Château of Ucelles. The garden had been allowed to run to seed, but the long avenue of limes approaching the house made stout sentinels for its dignity.

In a small wood of fir and plane trees, close to the house, stood the family chapel; the sun shone through the leaves above it, and the priest and the doctor caught a glimpse through the open grille of a tiny altar covered with fresh flowers. In front of the house stretched an uncultivated meadow, but in the centre a square was trimmed with neat little box hedges, and in the middle of the square was a small pond covered deep with water-lilies. Around it late roses and early chrysanthemums mingled their blooms together.

“He has always kept his mother’s garden gay,” said the Curé approvingly; “and the flowers in the chapel there are fresh. I prefer myself the artificial ones, but we must be indulgent to youth; the Church has always recognized that.”

The doctor frowned. The Curé had never revealed to him what his ambition for Jean was, but the doctor had long ago guessed it. You cannot know a man for thirty years and be entirely ignorant of his favourite idea, especially when he has not got more than one. The Curé wished Jean to become a priest, and the doctor hated the idea with all his heart. He was a Socialist, you must remember, a Radical and a cynic, so of course he wanted Jean to become a grand seigneur—a man of the world, and at the same time noted for his domestic happiness, with a large family of sons.

As for Jean himself, he wanted to become a musician, but nobody minded very much what Jean wanted.

“It has occurred to me,” said the Curé, after he had finished saying his Ave, “that we have been sent for—of course, you must understand that I have no authority for my idea; I am merely expressing what has passed through my mind—that we may be asked to consult with Mademoiselle Prenderghast on the subject of Monsieur Jean’s future.” The Curé coughed.

“There’s his uncle,” growled the doctor. “He ought to settle the question.”

“I think the boy’s taste should be considered,” suggested the Curé. He thought that he had formed Jean’s taste, and that he might safely leave it to settle matters his way.

“I wish he could have done his military service,” said the doctor. “If I had been the fool at the Maire de Valbranche I would have passed him; he is delicate, but it’s only raw, untrained nerves and morbid religious fancies. The old adhesion in the left lung they thought themselves so clever in spotting, why, it’s nothing—nothing at all, I tell you; just the result of that English spinster’s notion of how to treat a delicate child with measles. But there! modern science only goes by what’s at the end of a stethoscope, or a microscope, or a misanthrope,” said the doctor. He was not quite sure what a misanthrope was; however, it sounded all right, and, after all, the Curé wouldn’t know any better. “It doesn’t allow for life forces.”

“I have often told you that,” said the Curé complacently; “only I expressed it better. Science has tried to lead faith when she should have knelt before her.”

“Rubbish!” said the doctor.

By this time they had reached the house. Ucelles did not look quite so grand on a near approach. The long French windows opening on the terrasse had a cold and vacant air, most of the house was closed, so that it appeared half blind and wholly dumb; it needed all the sunshine of summer to help the observer to bear the freezing sense of departed life. When the doctor rang the bell it echoed hauntingly through the empty corridors, and it was a long while before Miss Prenderghast’s reliable English maid answered it. She did at last, and received the men’s greetings with all the sourness of an exiled mind. If Miss Prenderghast was not at home in France, Elizabeth was still less likely to be so. Miss Prenderghast regarded it with suspicion, but Elizabeth with open-eyed hostility. Everything was different from what Elizabeth had been accustomed to, and Elizabeth knew that everything which was different was wrong. But all human consistency breaks down somewhere; Elizabeth’s broke down over Jean. When she first saw him he was a little French boy, very French indeed, and a Catholic; and he was not the less French now nor less Catholic at twenty; but Elizabeth was human and she loved him. That was why she stayed in a heathen country.

“If you will please to come this way, sir,” she said, addressing the doctor—she pretended not to see the Curé, she was Protestant to the core; then she led them along the polished parquet corridor, till at last they reached the smallest of a suite of reception-rooms. It was full of sunshine and golden dust that glistened in the sunbeams between the ceiling and the floor, but there was very little else in the room except Miss Prenderghast; she was knitting.

“You can serve lunch, Elizabeth,” she said, before she greeted her visitors.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Elizabeth, but she did not intend to serve lunch until Jean came; her idea of veracity was as strictly relative as if she had been a Jesuit.

Miss Prenderghast’s dress was very high about the neck and rather short about the ankles. Her nose was her most prominent feature, and she looked as if she felt cold but would have thought it extremely foolish to take any precautions against it.

It is easy to distinguish in the faces of the middle-aged those from whom life has receded from those, in whose existence, it has never played a formidable part. It was to this latter category that Miss Prenderghast belonged. From her earliest years she had been taught to repress all her emotions, and she had repressed them so thoroughly that at times it seemed even to herself as if she no longer had any to suppress. She had put her heart into her sense of duty, a performance which had resulted in developing her conscience at the expense of all her natural instincts. Nobody likes having to deal with a robust conscience and anæmic emotions, the Latin races least of all. The two men, who bowed low, and obediently took the two small cane chairs provided for them, never considered Miss Prenderghast in the light of a human being. She appeared to them as a natural phenomenon of a disagreeable nature, such as a land-slide or a series of bad harvests.

“English ladies can have no temptations,” thought the Curé. “That is why they are Protestants.”

“We shall have trouble with Jean sooner or later,” the doctor said to himself; “he has his father’s blood in him, and he has been brought up by a stone.”

“It was very kind of you both to come,” said Miss Prenderghast coldly; “you must have found the walk from St. Jouin long and dusty.”

“On the contrary,” said the doctor politely, “where the destination is agreeable the path is scattered with flowers.”

“The wild flowers in this part of the country are remarkably scarce,” observed Miss Prenderghast. “I have often regretted it.”

A silence followed. The Curé drew out his handkerchief and spilt some snuff on the floor. The doctor sneezed and Miss Prenderghast frowned. She disliked French habits.

“I have received a letter from the Comte D’Ucelles,” she observed finally; “he is, as you may remember, Jean’s nearest relation upon the French side—in fact, his only near French relation.”

“Parfaitement,” replied the doctor, “he is a gallant man and has had a certain success in Paris. There is a remarkable resemblance between him and the late Baron.”

“Ah!” said Miss Prenderghast thoughtfully, “I trust it is only superficial. Still it cannot be helped; he is Jean’s uncle, and he has at last chosen to intimate some interest in the boy’s future.”

“Very natural, very natural indeed,” exclaimed the Curé. “Nothing could be more convenable, madame, the true spirit of a good Catholic and of an uncle!”

“It may be as you say,” replied Miss Prenderghast, with knitted brows. “In any case, he has waited long enough before showing either of them. However, it is not easy for me to make up my mind what it is best to do.”

“And Jean, what is his opinion?” asked the doctor.

“I have not consulted him upon the question,” said Miss Prenderghast. “It is possible I should have done so, in which case I should hardly have troubled you for your advice; but yesterday a very, very painful incident occurred, which has greatly shaken my intention.”

Both the doctor and the priest started; they did not look at each other, though they were thinking the same thought.

“He has fallen from grace,” the priest said to himself.

“He has become a man,” thought the doctor.

“He has written an opera,” said Miss Prenderghast impressively. Neither of the men could help looking a little disappointed.

“You may well be surprised,” said Miss Prenderghast with satisfaction. “I was myself perfectly unprepared for this blow. I knew he was musical and that—as I thought most unnecessarily, Monsieur le Curé—you had encouraged it by allowing him to play the organ in your church.” The Curé collapsed, the doctor looked radiant. “And you, doctor,” said Miss Prenderghast, “have not improved matters by insisting upon him attending the meetings of a disreputable orchestral society! This is the result.”

“Well, well,” said the doctor bravely, “his mother was a neurotic!”

“There are certain professions,” said the Curé mildly, “in which a knowledge of music is not altogether a misfortune. I have myself studied harmony for a fortnight during my training at the Seminary. I have never regretted it.”

“No, but your congregation has,” snapped the doctor.

“What do you suggest?” asked Miss Prenderghast.

The doctor looked at the Curé. He really had no idea in his head at all, but the Curé looked so full of his own importance and so determined on making Jean a priest that the doctor found himself saying:

“Paris!” He only meant it as a joke.

“Paris?” said Miss Prenderghast thoughtfully.

“Paris!” echoed the Curé in horror.

“Paris?” said a clear boy’s voice just behind them.

It was Jean himself, fresh from a morning in the woods, with a retriever puppy gamboling at his heels. It was youth, and hope, and ardour, and all incredible, dauntless things! It was the spirit of growing life and spring, and it was followed by Elizabeth, who promptly announced déjeuner, half an hour after the usual time.

“We will finish this discussion later on,” said Miss Prenderghast.

Jean greeted his two old friends cordially.

“But what is all this about Paris, Aunt Anne?” he asked, smiling a little as he held back the portière for her to pass out. “Have you and Monsieur le Curé and the doctor just discovered it?”

“You should not come into rooms suddenly,” said Miss Prenderghast coldly. “Then you would not overhear parts of other people’s conversations which were not meant for your ears.”

Jean frowned and apologized. Miss Prenderghast resented the frown, and ignored the apology.

It is so seldom that the very observant observe the right things. It was a dull lunch party; the doctor was a little frightened at Miss Prenderghast’s reception of his suggestion; the Curé was thinking how bad the lunch was, and how he could influence Jean to accept his point of view. Miss Prenderghast was greatly annoyed with Elizabeth. And to Jean the word “Paris” was like a lighted torch to a bundle of dry hay. Suddenly all his ideas had taken fire—but like all the fires of youth it burned silently, and none of his elders had the least idea that they were attending at a conflagration.

CHAPTER II

AFTER lunch Jean went to Elizabeth. She was washing up the dishes, or she preferred to let Jean think she was; as a matter of fact, she had been having what is known in servants’ quarters as a “snack,” but like all healthy, properly brought up English servants, she liked her employers to fancy that she lived upon air alone. Jean sat on the kitchen table and swung his legs to and fro in a confidential manner. He had an implicit masculine confidence in Elizabeth’s sympathy—Elizabeth was perhaps only a sour old maid, but she would know that he was there to have his grievance produced, and she would in time produce it for him. So he took a cigarette and waited.

“Oh, Master Jean, if Miss Anne should see you now!” said the scandalized Elizabeth. Jean was forbidden to smoke, but he knew Elizabeth admired it. His melancholy deep brown eyes had a sudden charming twinkle in them; he had a curious face, irregular as to its features, but very much alive; it reminded the observer of a young wild thing in the woods absorbed in the deep business of life.

“Though you do look nearly a man now,” went on Elizabeth, “and are grown so lately, Master Jean, and if I may say so, a thought more English about the shoulders.”

“I am a man,” said Jean. “I’m twenty, Elizabeth, and they’ve turned me out of their consultation as if I were a schoolboy, and I’m positive it’s about me.”

“There, there, Master Jean!” said Elizabeth soothingly. “You know you can get it all out of the doctor afterwards; ’e’s as easy to get into as a tin of apricots—’im and ’is professional secrets!”

Elizabeth snorted.

“I don’t like getting things out of people when they’re the things they ought to tell me any way,” said Jean. “When I went in this morning, Elizabeth, they were all saying ‘Paris’ as if they’d heard of it for the first time.”

Elizabeth looked at him thoughtfully.

“There was a letter from there this very morning,” she said, “with a seal on the back; perhaps it’s a fortune, Master Jean, come from your rich uncle in Paris.”

“More likely a misfortune, I’m afraid,” said Jean gloomily. “Well, Elizabeth, I think I’m going off to the woods again. Put something cold out for me to-night; I shan’t be back till late.”

Elizabeth looked anxious, but she knew better than to expostulate with her idol. She was allowed to worship only on the distinct understanding that she never interfered. A worshipper that tries to manage his god is confusing the situation. From his tenth birthday on, Jean had ruled Elizabeth with a rod of iron. It was a small kingdom, perhaps, for the little lonely boy, it only contained his dog and Elizabeth, but he ruled it well, and there had never been a hint of rebellion. Elizabeth knew that Miss Prenderghast had noticed these increasing despotic absences of Jean’s. He went away almost daily now for hours at a time, and gave no account whatever of his proceedings. Miss Prenderghast shook her head over them; she had a shocked suspicion, not unlike the priest and the doctor, that he might be meeting some woman; but she would have been even more shocked if she had known he was meeting his own soul. A woman would not have prevented Jean from becoming a bank clerk, but no one knows what a man’s soul may prevent him from becoming. It has led him before now to become an artist, and it has even taught him (and this is the hardest thing perhaps for thoroughly good, religious people to understand) to develop into a saint.

But Jean wasn’t going to become a saint, he was only born a musician, and he had inherited on both sides of his nature a certain recklessness, only thinly covered by a reticence which was not natural to him, the inevitable result of a sensitive nature that has not found in its early years any direct response.

His mother had had a romantic zest for all the adventures of the spirit, even her broken heart had not checked her dauntless craving for the impossible; she had ceased to look for it in her husband, but she had never found that the world was small. The Baron on his side had a lucid, unwavering instinct for pleasure, it was his intention to make everything serve his senses. This instinct had descended upon Jean in the shape of a fierce desire, of which he was hardly conscious, to tear something living and responsive from the grip of his future. As he strode off once more upon his innocent adventures his mind was fiercely and ardently awake and busy. “What had he done with his life?” he asked himself, in frenzied self-reproach. Here he was at twenty—no older, no more experienced, no more active than many a boy of fourteen. He did not take his attempted opera nearly as seriously as Miss Prenderghast had taken it; he was possessed by melody, he always had been; ever since he could remember he seemed to have been listening to a tune, but he hardly knew that he was peculiar in this, and he knew enough of the music to which great musicians had listened not to think too much of his own ambitious flutterings. “I have done nothing,” he said to himself bitterly. “I am nothing—I have no powers!” And he flung himself face downwards on the dry, dead leaves of the late summer in the terrible abandonment of youth. To have never left Ucelles in his life, to have been brought up a good Catholic, to have no friends but a sour-faced English cook and a few inarticulate peasants (it is sad to say that Jean forgot the Curé and the doctor), wasn’t that a certain proof of his failure in life? He thought of Maurice Golaud, that magnificent young man he had met at the Choral Society. Maurice had all the world before him—money, a family of admiring sisters, and that unacquirable self-confidence which the artist, except in rare moments of creation, never knows! Jean had tried to play to Maurice once, but he had broken down in the middle; it was the only thing he could do—play—and it had come over him suddenly that Maurice did not think much of playing. He thought a great deal more of how to curl your moustache and look at a woman, and for the moment Jean was not sure that Maurice was not right.

Jean buried his face in the long dried grass, and drank in the haunting, fresh scent of the dead leaves; the air was full of a faint, warm haze that crept across the distant fields and hung above the trees. The leaves that were still upon them were very dry with the heat and rattled a little as the soft breeze shook them together. The birds spoke in sharp, disconnected twitters; all the sounds and all the life of the earth seemed interrupted now, and yet urgent. The swallows flung themselves in long, unsettled curves about the sky; everything was changing, moving, departing. Jean alone must stay here always to the bitter sound of his own wasted life! He watched himself grow tamely, narrowly old, through the coming years; there would be nothing in him to challenge life. Maurice and his fellow-officers and their fun would go out once more into the merry world, Jean would remain. In time he would cease attending the Lycée, he would come home and farm Ucelles. In the evenings he would play a little if he was not too tired, but never his own music any more! Why should he shame the divine flickering gift within him, which he could never develop, nor yet throw away? He wanted to be a musician—he wanted only that—and he buried his face in the friendly dry leaves that scratched his cheeks, and wept.

“I shall never be able to do anything,” sobbed Jean. “I shall never be able to go anywhere, and I shall never meet anyone to love.”

Miss Prenderghast waited half an hour for dinner. It was an unfortunate half hour; in it all the sacrifices she had made for Jean increased with the inroad he was making upon punctuality.

For the last ten years Miss Prenderghast had been practising the stoic virtues, and though these are probably the hardest of all the virtues to practise, they rarely, if ever, make the possessor lovable. In this one half hour Miss Prenderghast saw their worthlessness, but she could not admit that she was to blame; surely the guardians of youth only owed to their special charges the one great duty of correction, to be met by youth in its turn with implicit obedience? And Miss Prenderghast knew that she had corrected Jean and that he had usually obeyed her. Between them these two admirable virtues had destroyed any human relationship. “He is lacking in consideration,” said Miss Prenderghast to herself, and she wiped her glasses. She had given Jean a gold watch for his birthday present, and he had not kissed her. She had told him at the time that she hoped it would make him more punctual.

Elizabeth brought in the soup at nine.

“Master Jean is very late,” said Miss Prenderghast; “put something cold on the sideboard, Elizabeth, and go to bed. I will sit up for him.”

There was such a tone of finality in Miss Prenderghast’s voice that Elizabeth almost obeyed her. She put some soup on the kitchen fire and began to do her hair in curl-papers on the stairs.

Jean came in a few minutes afterwards. He apologized perfunctorily for the lateness of the hour, and his aunt remarked that careless people always gave trouble. Jean accepted the thrust in silence; he did not think it fair to receive an apology with further correction; it had the result also of drying up any possible springs of remorse.

“He is becoming hardened,” thought his aunt miserably; then she advised him not to take butter with meat; she said it was an extravagant habit and un-English. Jean took more butter.

Miss Prenderghast sighed and shook her head.

“Well, Jean,” she said at last, “I daresay you wonder why I have been sitting up here for you, just as I have been wondering what has made you so late. Have you no explanation you can offer me?”

“No, ma Tante,” said Jean, without lifting his eyes from his plate. He looked very guilty.

“I would have forgiven him anything if he were not so secretive,” thought his aunt; aloud she said, “I am afraid you have been idling—or worse! You are twenty, old enough to be doing some good in the world if you have any capacity for it. The time has come for something to be decided about your future.”

Miss Prenderghast was only expressing in her own familiar way the very thoughts that had kept Jean lingering in the field, but it is extraordinary how very different our own thoughts about ourselves can sound from the lips of our nearest relatives! Jean had not felt in the least hostile to himself as he lay in the long grass, speculating as to his lack of the talents necessary for life, but he felt very hostile to Miss Prenderghast now; he kicked the table leg.

“I daresay you hardly remember your Uncle Romain,” she went on, with a grieved glance at the furniture; “you are hardly likely to, as hitherto his only interest in you has been displayed by his remarkable confidence in my powers of bringing you up. However, it appears he has suddenly remembered that he is your natural guardian, and has written to suggest a profession for you.”

“I remember my Uncle Romain extremely well,” said Jean with more haste than accuracy, “and I am grateful to him for his interest. What profession does he suggest?”

“The Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas,” said Miss Prenderghast. “You are to receive no salary for the first six months, and your uncle does not apparently intend to offer you his hospitality. I cannot congratulate you upon the generosity of your French relatives.”

Jean said nothing, he looked more than ever like a trapped wild thing in the flickering candlelight. His brown eyes shone with a fierce glint peculiar to them in moments of excitement, his thin, long brown hands moved with nervous gestures, and his nostrils quivered and dilated like those of an excited horse. It seemed a good moment to his aunt to make an appeal to his feelings.

“My dear boy,” she said, “if you go to Paris, as I fear you must, I foresee great temptations for you. I have done all I could to bring you up a decent, respectable member of society, and to bring out in you the strain of your English blood; but several things have been against me, your Roman Catholic religion and your naturally difficult temper. I have never quite felt as if you understood me, but that doesn’t matter now. Try to be honourable, straightforward and economical, and whatever you do, don’t be like your father—I don’t like to mention such horrors, but there it is; you have that to fight against as well as the temptations natural to any young man—the poor man came, as we know, to a shocking end.”

Jean flung back his chair and sprang to his feet. He spoke in a tone Miss Prenderghast had never heard him use before, and he lapsed into quick, explosive French, which she always found it difficult to follow.

“Do not dare to say these things to me, Madame,” he said hoarsely. “Respect my father’s memory, if you respect nothing else that is mine. He had courage, he was a gallant man, he never did a dishonourable thing in his life—he died sadly!”

“He died by his own hand,” interrupted Miss Prenderghast dryly, “after he had lived what, in my religion, would very rightly be termed a life of sin.”

“Mon Dieu! you shall not say these things to me,” cried Jean, and suddenly he caught up the plate nearest him, and with the quick gesture of an angry child, flung it through the nearest window-pane. It crashed through the glass of the long French window, out on to the terrace beyond. The boy trembled all over with excitement and fury. Miss Prenderghast regarded him with scandalized contempt. He had really startled her, but even in her astonishment she was scornful. Shame overwhelmed him; he rushed past her out into the long corridor, and tore upstairs to his room.

Elizabeth heard him; she ran out of her room to intercept him in a sulphur-coloured dressing-gown, her gray hair hanging about her head in rigid wisps.

“Ah, Master Jean! Master Jean! Whatever in the world ’ave you been and done?” she moaned in terror.

“Let me go! Let me go, Elizabeth! or I shall go mad,” gasped the boy.

“There, there! don’t you take on so, Master Jean,” said Elizabeth softly, but she let him go—she knew that there is one thing a man prefers even to a woman’s sympathy, and that is his own freedom.

Jean reached his room and flung himself headlong on his bed, shaking with sobs. “Why should he feel so—why should he always feel so much too much?” he asked himself. “He had acted like a bad child, like a mere boy; his aunt despised him. Who was he to go out and face the world, to see Paris—a man who could not keep his temper with his aunt?” Even lying there alone in the dark he felt the hot waves of colour rushing over him afresh. He had been rude to her, and she was a woman, and she had done so much for him! How he hated her having done so much for him—why couldn’t she have left him alone?

He raised his eyes to where he knew his mother’s crucifix was hung, but his Aunt Anne had said such things about his father—his poor father whose beautiful, unharassed eyes Jean so well remembered; and Jean had adored the father, who came so seldom but so grandly to Ucelles. His mother had been his life’s companion, but his father had been his dream—at the thought of the words his Aunt Anne had used about the late Baron the tears dried on his cheeks.

“No, I won’t apologize to her. I won’t,” said Jean, looking in the direction of the crucifix. Then he went on his knees and took out his rosary and prayed afresh all those special prayers the Curé had taught him to pray for his father’s wandering soul.

He felt vaguely comforted when he lay down again. His window was wide open and his room was full of the autumn evening. The night was very still; high above the avenue of whispering limes the waning moon slid idly through the sky. She was warped and twisted and out of shape, and silvery pale—she stood to Jean as a symbol of all perverted, tortured lives, his father’s, and his own too, perhaps; who knew what would happen to him in Paris? Not what his Aunt Anne thought, nothing ever happened quite as she thought, because life always leans a little to the side of the ideal, even in its ugliest moments; but strange things other than Jean could yet imagine? He prayed again that he might not disgrace his name and his blood.

Even his Aunt Anne had good blood, he remembered; she had never stirred when he had looked his savage rage at her and flung the plate through the window. No! he could not apologize to her, but he would pray too for his Aunt Anne. He was not quite sure what form his prayer should take—the Curé had told him always to pray that Miss Prenderghast might become a Catholic; but Jean had never felt that this was quite fair, for he knew how very little his Aunt Anne herself wanted it; at present, too, he particularly wished to be fair. So he decided at last to pray to St. Joseph, who was well known to be particularly benevolent, to grant his Aunt Anne any good thing that she might want. “And if she doesn’t want any good thing,” he argued to himself, “it really isn’t my fault!”

He would have been very much surprised, and even a little touched, if he had known that his aunt was at that very moment praying for him.

“I do not think I have been very wise,” Miss Prenderghast prayed, “but I cannot approve of his French relations, and I knew it was my duty to warn him against his father’s awful example. If I have done aught amiss—and I do not think the boy’s temper entirely his own fault (the Prenderghasts, too, always as a family had hasty tempers)—forgive me—lay his temper to my charge, and protect him, if it is possible, from Paris!”

As for Elizabeth, she prayed that Jean might enjoy himself. (In spite of her appearance, there was something rather Greek about Elizabeth.)

CHAPTER III

THE doctor gave Jean a thermometer as a parting present, and the Curé brought him a little medal of St. Francis; he gave it to Jean after mass on his last morning.

“Always wear this, my son,” he said, “it has been blessed by the Bishop. I tried to get a eucalyptus rosary which had received the Holy Father’s own touch, but it had been sent by mistake to Adélaide la Court, who is just going into service. It was necessary for her to be safeguarded in every way. I think, however, you will find this medal very efficacious. Do not forget your prayers, go to Mass regularly, and never miss a fast. You will find Paris very different in some ways from St. Jouin, at least I have always gathered so; but the Church is the same, nothing ever changes that. Keep your vocation.”

Jean nodded—he was not quite sure what his vocation was, but he foresaw no difficulty in keeping it.

Miss Prenderghast had been lying awake half the night, thinking how she should say good-bye to Jean. She said it very badly; he was all she had in the world, and she had never really had him. Jean made her a polite little speech in which he thanked her for all she had done for him, and Miss Prenderghast said, “Nonsense, somebody had to do it!” and “For goodness sake, boy, don’t gush; it’s not English.”

Jean hesitated for a moment, bowed, kissed her hand and left her. Then he ran into the kitchen and threw his arms around Elizabeth.

“For shame, Master Jean,” cried Elizabeth, with gratified horror. “You a great big man, how could you go for to do such a thing?”

“Oh, Elizabeth,” said Jean, and he was laughing and almost crying at the same time, “a man must kiss somebody, you know. You’ve been very good to me, Elizabeth!”

“There! there! Master Jean,” said Elizabeth, who was wholly crying. “You’ll take care of yourself, my lamb, now, won’t you? And don’t pay no attention to what nobody says to you in that there wicked Paris full of hussies and what not? You go your own way, Master Jean dear, and if you’re ever in want of anything you’ll write and tell me, won’t you? I know what young men and short commons is, and I’ve saved my wages for many a year a-purpose!”

“Oh, Elizabeth!” said Jean at last, “but you know a man can’t take money from a woman!”

“Can’t ’e though, my dear?” said Elizabeth grimly. “Then all I can say is ’e can take many other things which are a sight worse for ’im—for ’im and for ’er too, for the matter of that! Don’t you go muddlin’ yer ’ead with them notions, and oh! for ’eaven’s sake, Master Jean, don’t sit in yer wet feet or go short of your food!”

Elizabeth hadn’t any parting present to give Jean—but when he went out of the kitchen, he ran by a back way across the fields, because he did not want anyone just then to see his face, and Elizabeth sat at the kitchen table with her head on her arms, and refused to answer the bell to clear away the breakfast. She was the only person in St. Jouin who realized that Jean would never come back again—someone like him would return, no doubt, with his eyes and his voice, but the Jean D’Ucelles who ran across the wet, wind-blown fields that autumn morning would be a different person altogether.

On the railway station Jean found several of his class-mates from the Lycée, and among them Maurice Golaud, the young officer who was quartered at St. Jouin.

“Ah, you lucky beggar!” he cried. “Just to think that in seven hours’ time you will be in the heart of the universe, while I am wasting away in this old, aimless penitentiary of a spot. You don’t know what’s before you, my boy! The cafés, the good little drinks, the fine little dinners, the dear little women! I am sick for the sound of the streets and the lights down the Champs-Elysées in the evening! What a world, and what a place this country, where you go about knee-deep in mud to each other’s funerals, with only the cows to look at! But you’ll be strange at first, mon cher! Look here, I know what I’ll do,” and he took out a card with an address on it and pushed it into Jean’s hand. “Go and call there,” he said, as the train started. “If I can’t run up and put you through your paces, you’ll see someone there who’s worth seeing; at least she is usually considered to be so!” Maurice gave a significant twist to his moustache as he spoke. He was really more proud of the lady who lived at the address than of that extremely handsome feature, in fact he considered them both his features, and he thought he was very generous to let Jean have the unexampled opportunity of observing them. As for Jean, he put the address carefully in his pocket; it seemed to him that after all he should not be so very friendless in Paris.

The train took its short, uneven way through the flat lands of France.

Poplars and a pale sky, with peasants working in the fields, stretched through an eternity of daylight.

Here and there towers of grey stone and groups of tall, narrow houses broke through the long monotony of the fields, and Jean’s heart beat faster with the hope that this time it was really Paris.

The rain came on again, and the short day was closing before Jean realized that the sudden stream of grey houses was after all not going to break again into empty fields, but was Paris herself, the great insignificant fringe of the world’s enigma, the city where there is most pleasure and least happiness—the cleverest thought and the vainest action—where more ideas are born and more perish in their tarnished bloom than any other place on earth. None of these things did Jean dream of, as out of the grey evening the lights of Paris broke, wave after wave of them, through the curtain of rain, like handfuls of splendid jewels prodigally flung into colourless mud. And with the lights came the sound—the sound of Paris, which is so different from the soft, dull roar of London or the sharp, hysterical scream of New York, the sound that is pitilessly light and infinitely gay—the voice of Paris, which is like the laughter of a heartless woman mocking at a life she has wrecked. And when Jean heard it he drew his breath in for a moment and felt afraid.

Jean had never seen so many people in his life as he saw at the terminus of the Gare St. Lazare, nor had he ever seen people move so freely and so quickly; there was neither stiffness nor bustle in the swiftly circulating crowd. He dragged his valise on to the platform, feeling strange and isolated in this new, bewildering world.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said a voice behind him, “but I think you must be Monsieur le Baron. I come from the Comte D’Ucelles, sir.”

Henri would have liked extremely to have come to Jean’s assistance, but beyond seeing after his scanty luggage and placing the oldest rug over him in the motor as comfortably as possible, there was nothing he could do. Still, Jean saw the friendliness in his eyes and liked it. It was the only friendliness he was to see for some time.

As he was dressing as quickly as he could for eight o’clock dinner (his train had been late and Henri had warned him to hurry) the Comte D’Ucelles tapped at his door and entered. Romain was a man who wore fifty years easily, he had a most charming manner and a perpetual smile; what he looked like when he wasn’t smiling no one ever knew, for no one had ever seen his face in repose. He smiled when he was pleased, when he was bored, and when he was angry. He did not smile when he was amused, because he had not been amused for some time; he had long ago worn out his capacity for amusement. He met Jean with a generous outburst of reproach.

Upon his honour—was this really Jean? And why on earth hadn’t he seen him all these preposterous years? Jean had really behaved abominably to them; and how immensely he had grown, and what a charming time he would have in Paris! He asked after Miss Prenderghast, he rallied Jean on the broken hearts he was certain to have left behind him in the country; he made the most lavish excuses for having put Jean into such a wretched room, though it was the handsomest Jean had ever seen.

“It’s intolerable, my dear fellow, that I can’t put you up permanently,” he went on, with his hard, light eyes wandering about the stately apartment and taking in the shabby luggage, the shy youth, the pitiful, small appearance which made Romain after all think that his wife had been right; “but as a matter of fact, you know, your good aunt is a little strict—young men will be young men, and in Paris—well! well! Paris isn’t a young man’s class of the Catechism, and the home is sacred! I assure you, my dear boy, I keep it so, and so must you, you know, when you marry; and meanwhile have rooms—have rooms—they’ve fascinating places in Paris to be had for almost nothing; we’ll look into all that to-morrow. And now we mustn’t keep your aunt waiting. To-morrow I’ll send you to a decent tailor; that suit won’t quite do for Paris, you know!”

Jean felt it wouldn’t. He had thought it very smart before, but he was broader and taller than his father, and the sleeves were too short, and the back too tight; besides, it looked different from his uncle’s.

Romain laughed genially, not cruelly, at Jean’s embarrassment; still Jean felt that he had disappointed this brilliant being; he wished he could think of something suitable to say, something dashing and witty and in the tone of his uncle’s talk; but he could think of nothing. He had always fancied before that conversation was a means of expressing what you wanted to say, a direct channel, as it were, for some very definite idea, but this hardly seemed Romain’s notion of the art. His words seemed to stand like a screen between Jean and his thoughts, and to take the place of some hard, light enamel covering a hidden substance. He ran on with his continual easy banter, quite as if he were Jean’s age, or as if Jean were his; and as if nothing in the world mattered, or could be worth a moment’s uneasiness or discomfort.

“We’ve very few people to-night,” he said. “I would have kept you quite to ourselves, you know, if I could, but one’s funny little social life here beats up like a tide; you cannot keep the waves off your particular piece of shore without being as ridiculous as King Canute was with the Atlantic, in your charming old England—which reminds me, my dear boy, I am sending you in to-night with an American girl; she can’t talk French, of course, or at least we hope against hope that she won’t try, and no one else can talk English, so you’ll have the very great honour! Make an impression upon her, I assure you it’s quite worth your while; she’s immensely rich and immensely handsome, and is going to be, I believe, quite the rage. I must confess to you American women don’t suit me, I prefer flesh and blood in a woman, not sawdust and cold steel. All the same, she has a ravishing figure, and I believe the figure of her income is still more magnificent. They may both be quite natural, for all I know to the contrary, but your dear aunt has made certain of the money!”

Jean was accustomed to a large house full of old things, but they were an entirely different type of old things from that of which his Uncle Romain had acquired possession. They were old because they were worn out and shabby, they were not old because they were precious and rare. The reception-rooms through which he passed with Romain to the drawing-room, where Madame D’Ucelles awaited them, were not larger than those he had left behind him, but they seemed so, because of their extraordinary brilliant emptiness. The first that they passed through had nothing in it but portraits, and a wonderful old bronze on a pedestal; this opened into another, with very little, very perfect Louis XVI. furniture. The chimney was in marble, with a delicate Sèvres china clock; in the corner was a grand piano covered with ancient jewel-encrusted embroidery. A screen of painted leather stood by the side of the fireplace, and one wall was entirely covered with shelves of oriental china. Madame D’Ucelles and a small group of friends stood by the fire. Jean had seen evening dress before in a provincial theatre, but it was not in the least like this. He hardly recognized his aunt in the bedizened, exposed, and highly coloured lady leaning over an old rose-pink sofa in an attitude that she tried to make as gracefully light as she could.

Madame la Comtesse D’Ucelles was extremely handicapped in the social race by a hopeless lack of the souplesse she adored.

One of Romain’s friends said of her: “Our poor Marie would so love to be thought indiscreet, but what can one say? She fights hard to produce the appearance of evil, but the upper lip and the stubborn bourgeois blood refuse to permit such laxity. She is hopelessly bonne femme, she cannot be anything wilder than a dear old cow. It is true that she can, if she likes, kick over the pail, but what she can’t do is to produce champagne instead of good rich country milk, and that, poor dear, is what she wants to do! She cannot go to anyone’s head, she is not intoxicating, she can only (look at our good Romain) help to create an embonpoint!”

Madame D’Ucelles’ upper lip might be against her, but she and her dressmaker had fought hard to defeat it! Of all the little group around her, she most looked to her nephew from the country, the extreme presentment of the ultra-fashionable life he had heard of and read about. Perhaps if Marie had known of this impression she might have allowed it to soften her manner a little; but as it was, she fixed her small, round, brown eyes on Jean, and despised him.

He was all the things she hated—poor, young, without even an incipient material value, and yet, even in his badly-fitting clothes and in the midst of a room full of strange sounds and light, and critical human beings, there was in him that ineradicable ease of race.

He was shy but he was not awkward; he was embarrassed but he was not as the men of her class would have been, clumsy. He did not, indeed, know quite what to say, but he lifted clear eyes to her face; and if there was anything that Madame D’Ucelles never forgave, it was dignity in an inferior. Jean had not felt his uncle’s light laughter at his appearance half as much as he felt the scornful glitter in his aunt’s eyes. Without moving her elbow from the sofa on which she leaned, she gave him her heavily bejewelled fingers to kiss.

“Your train must have been late, I fancy,” she said. “I hope you left your aunt well in the country; we must discuss our family affairs by and by. Miss Vanderpool, let me introduce my nephew to you—le Baron D’Ucelles, Miss Vanderpool. Romain, dinner has already been announced.”

Jean turned his attention to a magnificent young woman who seemed to take instant possession of him with a flicker of her stony, flat, grey eyes.

“I am delighted you can talk English,” she said to her companion. “My! I do get so weary of trying to slip into French; not that I ever do try very hard, though I take lessons every day, but one has to understand a bit, so as not to be taken in.”

Jean did not imagine that the young woman beside him would ever run much risk in that direction. Pauline Vanderpool was indeed, as Romain had told him, a very handsome young woman, but Jean thought she could never under any circumstances have been a young girl. She was dressed with consummate taste, though she wore rather too many pearls. She had the finished manner of a woman who is accustomed to admiring obedience, and he could never imagine anyone venturing either to deceive her or to disagree with her.

“I think the Comtesse is a real smart woman,” she obligingly added to Jean, as they took their seats. “She’s your aunt, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she is my uncle’s wife,” said Jean.

“Well! that’s a good enough aunt in America,” conceded his companion. “She says she likes me, she says she adores me; do you think she’s sincere?”

Jean looked rather helpless.

“I don’t know my aunt very well,” he said at last.

Pauline threw back her head and laughed.

“Well, it’s easy to see that your mother was an Englishwoman,” she said. “Why, if I’d given your Uncle Romain that opening, he’d have sent me blushing into next week.”

“I’m afraid I am very stupid, mademoiselle,” said poor Jean. “I’ve only just come to Paris.” It was evident that whatever blushing there was going to be, would be entirely on Jean’s part.

Pauline laughed again.

“I suppose you are going to live right away with the D’Ucelles, aren’t you?” she asked curiously.

“No, I don’t think so, mademoiselle,” said Jean.

“My! but that’s odd,” cried Pauline, regarding him closely. “Why ever not?—where are you going to live, then?”

“I shall find rooms to-morrow, I imagine.”

“You people over here are funny,” said Pauline. “I suppose as your uncle and aunt haven’t any children, you are their heir, aren’t you?”

Jean shrugged his shoulders; he was getting angry, and it improved his manner.

“I am really afraid you must ask them, mademoiselle,” he said gently. “I know so very little myself about their affairs.”

“I suppose you have money of your own, then?” inquired the relentless Pauline.

“Mademoiselle, I have enough,” said Jean, trembling with rage.

“All the same,” Pauline went on, “I think it’s real mean of them not to keep you on here. Why, their house is as big as an hotel. Doesn’t it make you mad?”

“If you do not mind, mademoiselle, I should prefer not to discuss my relations in a language that they do not understand,” said Jean, biting his lip.

Pauline stared at him.

“Goodness me!” she exclaimed. “You wouldn’t discuss them in a language they could, I suppose?”

Jean hesitated.

“In France,” he said gently, “it is not our custom to discuss our relations at all.” And this time Pauline did understand. She did not blush, nor did she show any sign of displeasure. She measured Jean with a calculating eye; he was a negligible quantity, poor Jean—he was not even good looking; his face was too thin and too pallid, his features too angular, only his clear-cut, sensitive mouth and a certain shining eagerness in his vivid dark eyes held the observer’s attention, but they did not hold Pauline’s.

“In America,” she said, with calm distinctness, “we discuss what we choose, and I guess I intend to allow myself the very same licence over here!” And she turned a beautiful white shoulder upon Jean and devoted the rest of dinner to her other neighbour.

It was the second time that evening in which Jean discovered that if you have no material value you are not supposed to claim the right of a spiritual one.

Romain laughed at him after dinner.

“My dear boy!” he said, “what on earth did you say to La Belle Américaine to make her deluge poor Le Blanc with her atrocious French. He says she gave him a tooth ache; were you trying to snub her?”

Jean flushed scarlet.

“You did not tell me she had no manners!” he muttered.

Romain laughed again.

“My poor child,” he said, “good manners are historical nowadays; they are the survival of race. One does not expect them from Americans; they have—those charming children of yesterday—nothing to survive from. It is true one hears of the Pilgrim Fathers, but that can hardly be looked upon as a satisfactory pedigree, particularly as one gathers from the absence of all allusion to the mothers that ‘ces gens-là’ married beneath them! I don’t offer people advice as a rule, it might bore them and it would certainly bore me; still I will go so far as to say to you that you mustn’t think too much about manners. You see the rich have inherited the earth, but they’ve kept, poor dears, the manners of the soil, and it’s considered a little diplomatic just now to meet them half way. You take me, perhaps? An air just a little less rigid than your own, my dear Jean, will find itself more at home in Paris. Don’t trouble to go into the drawing-room again; if you’re tired go to bed.”

Jean escaped with relief. He thought his Uncle Romain fascinating, but he felt horribly raw and exposed, and quite appallingly young. When he reached his room he found that Henri had unpacked all his things, and put the thermometer and the medal on the dressing-table. There was an absence of direct utility about these memorials that went to Jean’s very heart.

At the sight of his incompetent treasures, all the jumbled impressions of the day rose up before him, the surprises, the shames, the bewilderments, and the loneliness. He too, like them, had nothing about him that seemed fitted to shine in this new existence; but they were more fortunate than he, for they did not lie awake far into the night wishing that they were ten years older, and could talk without meaning anything, and had a new dress-coat.

They lay on the dressing-table surrounded by beautiful silver ornaments, quite as if they were on the old wooden washing-stand in St. Jouin and not in the least aware of any depreciation in their value.

CHAPTER IV

“MY dear fellow,” said Romain, wandering vaguely into the breakfast-room at about eleven the following morning. “I really am quite desolated, but I find I can’t take you to the Bank to-day. It appears that I promised your aunt in some dreadful forgotten hour to go to a wedding, a funeral, or a christening—I never can keep any account of church functions, can you?—of a distant cousin on her side of the family. You and I, my dear Jean, manage better; we keep, as it were, our relatives down—between us I doubt if we could raise half a dozen; but I have always noticed a terrible tendency in families such as your aunt’s to have relations, here, there, and everywhere, and such substantial people too; and one can’t get away from substantial people in church. For my part I am a good Catholic, I think I may fairly say. I have the mind of a Byzantine, but I do not like the personal note in religion. I would so very much rather not know whom I am praying beside. A smart wedding is one thing, but your aunt’s relations do not have smart weddings. One goes to out-of-the-way churches where large, red-faced women in purple dresses weep into their handkerchiefs. I do not find myself inspired to comfort them. No, I have had my déjeuner, thanks, in my room—and you?”

It seemed that Henri had brought Jean something more than an hour ago.

“Yes,” said Romain thoughtfully, “Henri is an excellent servant, he thinks of things. Do you know I have such a good idea. He shall take you to the Bank this morning, and afterwards find you rooms! After all I do not think I should be of the least use in looking for rooms, candidly—I am not a man of affairs, and when it comes to questions of money I am very like the lilies of the field; as I have neither toiled nor spun, you know, I don’t quite appreciate how to economize. I daresay Henri knows a great deal about Paris, and I recommend you to find out what. Henri, take Monsieur le Baron to this address, and afterwards put yourself at his disposal to look for rooms. Now, my dear Jean, I don’t think there is anything more I can do for you, is there? Your aunt finds herself a little fatigued this morning, and I believe will not be able to give herself the pleasure of seeing you. That matters the less as I shall expect you, of course, to look on this house as your headquarters; come in and out whenever you like, you know. Au revoir!”

It would hardly be worth while relating the parting blessing of Romain if Jean had been so fortunate as to see him in the weeks that followed; but though he called six times upon his uncle in the next fortnight, he never found Romain in. Once indeed he met him in the evening entering a café, but Romain did not seem to see him. He was very much pre-occupied at the moment, preserving in his own inimitable way the sanctities of the home; but there was something in his eyes as he looked at Jean without seeing him which decided Jean not to call again without an invitation; and the invitation did not come. It was to Henri instead that Jean owed his introduction to Paris.

So this was Paris—Paris the siren city of all the world—this drenched, grey, violently noisy spectacle. The streets were full of thick and greasy mud, a multitude of shrieking taxis, thundering drays, and bustling tradesmen’s carts flung themselves fantastically through the crowded thoroughfares. The shrouded, dripping houses seemed to Jean to look disreputably, unwholesomely fatigued; the raw, heavy air made him shiver, and hurt his chest.

“Could we,” he asked Henry, “go by the Louvre and Nôtre Dame?”

Henri looked surprised, but he only replied:

“Where you wish, Monsieur; that you see away there on your left is the Louvre. Myself I think it triste, but it is worse inside; there is a cemetery there, and a cemetery indoors—there is something about it that chills the spine! Monsieur does not want to enter now, does he?”

“Just a minute,” pleaded Jean, “only a minute, if we have time.”

“But yes,” said Henri, giving in with a good grace when he found he must. “All the time in the world, only Monsieur le Baron must not expect to find much to amuse him in the Louvre; places of that kind in Paris are chiefly valuable for the English and the Americans—for that, yes, they are useful; but for us, I assure Monsieur, they are not at all considered the thing. There is the Luxembourg, now, which is far more gay, and one need not have been dead many years before one appears in it. But Monsieur will please himself.”

Jean did please himself; he left Henri in an outer court, and hardly knowing what led him, Jean went straight through the long corridor to the little room at the end where against her red curtain the Venus of the soul leans a little forward in tender welcome to her worshippers. Jean stood there for a long time, his hat in his hand, his eyes full of tears, looking at her. He felt as if amongst a crowd of hostile strangers he had seen his mother’s face.

There are certain moments in life that can never be repeated—one’s first great sorrow—one’s first great temptation—and one’s first sight of a divinely beautiful created thing.

Henri regarded Jean with perplexity when he came out of the Louvre.

“Monsieur le Baron has perhaps met a friend?” he asked inquisitively.

Jean blushed a little.

“Yes,” he said simply, “I have met a friend.”

“Monsieur begins well,” replied Henri with relief. “In Paris one needs friends. And now for the Bank, Monsieur le Baron. This to your left here is the Luxembourg; in the summer the garden has a most chic appearance. One finds there the smartest nursemaids in Paris; there are also pictures within. I have an idea that we may find Monsieur rooms behind the Luxembourg. I shall make the endeavour; since Monsieur is to be alone at first, cheerful surroundings are of importance. Here is the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, as Monsieur le Baron sees.”

Jean hesitated a moment before the heavy front of his future prison. He knew quite well it would be to him a prison, and he feared his first deliberate entrance into it. He had not realized how he had counted on his light-hearted, unembarrassed uncle to help him make the first plunge into a serious life, but he remembered that he was after all Jean D’Ucelles, and that he would not have liked the Venus of Milo to be ashamed of him; so he pushed back the heavy doors and entered, presenting his letter quite firmly to a youth who was under the impression that it was his place as doorkeeper to impede as far as possible anyone who wished to go out or in. After a contemptuous stare at Jean, he turned the letter over, whistled, and vanished. By and by a much more important individual requested Jean to follow him; and he passed through a green-baize door shrouded in mystery, and found himself in the Directors’ room.

The Director gave him fully five minutes; he told him where to go next morning, and said that he might begin his duties then, and that the head clerk would tell him what to do. The Director asked after the Comte D’Ucelles and suggested that some day Jean might dine with him. Then he rang the bell and dismissed him. The one idea that had come to Jean during this important interview was that there was something the matter with his clothes. He explained his fears to Henri and consulted him about Romain’s tailor, though he thought he would probably prove too expensive.

“Why should Monsieur le Baron pay for his clothes at all?” asked Henri. “The name is the same.”

Jean was very indignant with Henri, which was a mistake, because Henri instantly retired into his shell.

“Mon Dieu!” he said to himself. “They come from the country with their eyes glued shut and their mouths open, and then wonder why they remain hungry! It is, after all, only in Paris that we know how to get the world between our teeth! Let him learn this! For myself, I shall do better to keep my mouth shut. It is a terrible task to teach a fool.” And so Jean lost his only friend in Paris.

In the end Jean ordered the suit, and was relieved to find that he should not have to pay for it at once.

“He has come to Paris straight from the bon Dieu,” thought Henri. “Quelle bêtise!”

“Monsieur le Baron will get very wet if he wishes to go as far as Nôtre Dame,” he remarked aloud. “But from this bridge here across the Seine we can see it very well. I should say if anything better; it is not a fashionable church!”

Jean strained his eyes through the curtain of rain to catch the towers of Nôtre Dame. To-day there was no sunshine, and the cathedral crouched menacingly under the dispirited sky, a big, colourless block of time-defiant stone. Henri shivered ostentatiously—he did not wish to encourage Jean to remain out longer in the rain. He ventured to suggest that rain in Paris being, as a well known fact, highly dangerous for strangers, Monsieur le Baron would do well first to get something of a cordial nature to drink, and then to find his lodgings as soon as possible. Jean obeyed both suggestions, and Henri benefited, as he had intended, by the first.

It was not, however, so easy to find lodgings; everything—even the least attractive rooms at the top of the steepest flight of stairs—seemed to Jean’s country mind wickedly extravagant.

“But one cannot need to pay all that just for a room to sleep in?” he expostulated over and over again.

“In Paris,” observed Henri, “the very air is worth more than elsewhere, but, Monsieur le Baron, I grieve very much to have to say it, hitherto we have made an attempt to keep to the fashionable quarter. I know very well where we can get rooms cheaper, but I had not wished to mention it. On my return, Monsieur le Comte will snap his fingers and say to me, ‘Then you have buried Monsieur my nephew in a neighbourhood of greengrocers; I am to fall over cabbages in order to see him, hein!’ And yet if one cannot have Bohemian pheasants, one need not starve on soup made from bones! That is how I look at it, Monsieur le Baron. Shall we try another quarter?”

“Yes,” said Jean impatiently. “Any other quarter. I do not wish to be fashionable to sleep! Anywhere that I can find a clean, decent room, and get into it out of this noise and rain, I shall be satisfied.”

“Noise, Monsieur?” said Henri, a little shocked. “What you hear is not noise, it is Paris. Down here by the river then and across the bridge. There, Monsieur, is the Académie Française. People think very much of it, I am told. I prefer Les Capucines, but chacun son goût, non? And here in the Rue de Seine is perhaps something for Monsieur.”

Jean was by this time so tired that even if Numéro 5, Rue de Seine, had been more grey, more dirty, more coldly stuffy and draughty than it was, he would have closed with it thankfully. Henri persisted in seeing the bright side of things—there were but four flights of stairs—the room was, he really thought, a marvel of cheapness; the concierge’s wife said so—there was a café opposite, so convenient for the meals of Monsieur—and then the view! Monsieur, being fresh from the country, would appreciate the fact that it was at the back of the house, where it had the quiet of a desert and a view of the sky itself. Henri thought there was something very cheerful about so many gilt mirrors, and he pointed out to Jean that with the help of a few photographs of beautiful women and a chair, which he could hire for a trifle from Henri’s nephew only two streets away, the room would have a distinguished air that would impress his uncle; in short (with a wink at the concierge’s wife) he thought that Monsieur le Baron was to be congratulated; and now was there anything more that he, Henri, could do for him?

No, Jean thought there wasn’t, and he was very grateful and shook hands so cordially with Henri, not forgetting either to give him ten francs, that Henri felt quite cross and bitter as he went downstairs; he almost refused the ten francs, and all the rest of the day he was sorry he had not refused them. However, he eased his conscience by speaking very handsomely of Jean to the concierge’s wife, and telling her it would be well worth her while to look after Jean as if he were her own son; and he arranged that Jean should have the armchair for less than his nephew would have wished to charge.

As for Jean, left alone in the gathering dusk of the autumn afternoon, there was nothing more anyone could do for him, and he realized, as he had never done before, what a very great deal there was left for him to do for himself.

CHAPTER V

JEAN tried hard to be interested in his daily work. The day after Henri left him he went to the Bank with the greatest punctuality, and had in consequence to walk up and down the pavement for half an hour outside, before the door opened. It was a chastening experience and Jean did not repeat it. He worked with diligence and industry at the tasks the head clerk assigned him, and found that by so doing he had hours on his hands with nothing to do at all; he also annoyed his fellow clerks, and they told him so. Jean was an extremely good-natured person upon all indifferent subjects (and like all artists, most subjects were indifferent to him). His pride was far too deep-seated an affair ever to appear in the presence of his inferiors, so that he gave up any inordinate desire to distinguish himself among columns of figures and bundles of cheques, and wrote bars of music on all available scraps of paper instead. This amused Jean and appeased the clerks, and the business of the Bank, not being entirely in the hands of these young gentlemen, went on in much the same manner as before.

After a fortnight the clerks decided that as Jean had shown no nonsense about him, had borne ridicule with indifference and accepted tips of the trade with a clear desire to show himself amenable, he might, if he responded favourably, be introduced into their real life.

Jean was intensely anxious to see real life and without the remotest notion of what it meant, so he responded with enthusiasm. He was invited to dine with three men at a café and go on to a few little things afterwards.

It was then that Jean made a most shocking discovery—he did not like life!

No! there was no doubt about it whatever; he was twenty-one, and in full possession of his faculties, and this presentment of existence so handsomely offered him by these junior clerks of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas did not amuse him at all. It even appeared to him ugly, meaningless and vulgar. This then was what the Curé meant by temptation, and what the doctor meant by “life,” and what his Aunt Anne would doubtless mean—a little sweepingly perhaps—by “sin.” And it was this kind of thing which destroyed his father?

It could not help surprising Jean; and it did not occur to him that there are as many forms of one particular kind of temptation as there are shapes of one particular feature, and because you do not admire a snub nose there is still the possibility of submission to the shape of a perfect Greek. At first Jean thought that perhaps the world was right and he was wrong (this is a great admission for any youth to make) and that the only difficulty lay in amusement being an acquired taste. So without confiding to his fellow clerks how extremely he disliked their little parties (which were for the most part harmless enough and not more vulgar than the extremely small salaries at their disposal warranted) Jean set himself to acquire the missing flavour. He was very much in earnest about it, and he spent an awful evening trying to entertain a little lady, who sang at a café, and to whom he had been introduced as a great and enormous privilege the evening before. The little lady had one idea of amusement and poor Jean had quite another. She wanted to attract attention, and it appeared that Jean did not. When at the end of the evening she got up on a table and danced, Jean would have liked to get under it and be no more seen.

It was then that he made his second decision. He saw that he was meant to be a hermit. It was quite probable that the lady would have agreed with him.

Jean set about altering his life as fast as possible; at twenty-one there is never any time to lose. So far his religion had been as natural as the air he breathed, but it had not been, so he owned himself, very practical. He had been born a good Catholic, as he had been born a gentleman, and he had considered his faith in the light of spiritual good manners. One fasted on Fridays and vigils and went to Mass on Sunday; it would have been extremely bad form and regrettably republican not to do so; still Jean felt that there were depths he had never plumbed. He told his Confessor this, and he pointed out to him that he was drawn to a higher life; he also added that he could not for a moment understand a taste for any other. The Confessor was an old man, he knew a good deal about life, and he listened very humbly to Jean. He saw that Jean was suffering from a feeling that the Church had hardly done its duty in permitting sin at this time of day to exist, and that something ought to be done about it at once. Jean explained to the Confessor that he thought the world, the flesh and the devil overrated as temptations, and if only the Church would show people how dull and vulgar all life that was not a direct spiritual vocation was, hermits would increase from that moment. The Confessor did not say that this, to him, would hardly be a desirable termination. He was not at all a sarcastic Confessor, and he was very fond of young men.

“I think, perhaps,” he said rather cautiously, “you do not know all about it yet. There are”—he hesitated again; he seemed a painfully slow old man to Jean—“so many different kinds of things.” He finished very lamely, Jean thought.

“To me there are only two kinds of things,” said Jean firmly—“what is beautiful and what is not. I have chosen.” He expected the priest to say something more, something a little appreciative perhaps, but he only sighed. “Of course, other people may be different,” added Jean, who was afraid he might have sounded intolerant.

“But I do not think they are,” said his Confessor gently. “My dear son, I think we are all very much alike. I have lived a long while, and I have seen very few different people, and those who have sometimes thought themselves so have not always proved very wise.”

Jean let this pass, it did not sound to him very probable.

“But you approve of my desire, do you not, father?” he added with impatience; he was beginning to think he had not made a good choice of a Confessor.

“I do not think I know quite what it is,” said the priest, after a pause.

“I mean to join the Third Order of St. Francis, and, while endeavouring, for a year at least, to stay in the world, to be preparing myself possibly for a sterner vocation.” How proud and pleased the good Curé at home would have been if he could have heard Jean, and how disgusted the doctor! But Jean’s present auditor was neither pleased nor disgusted, nor even very much surprised.

“I should not join any Order yet if I were you,” he answered. “You have told me that you are twenty-one—no, I should not join any Order; but for the rest I approve, my son, only——” The Confessor paused again.

“Yes, my father?” said Jean. He felt that every moment was wasted in which he was not leading the higher life, and he was impatient for the Confessor to give him some rules.

“Only,” said the father at last, “I think we should all beware of spiritual pride, it is apt to weaken the mind. I fancy we cannot see very clearly what is right if we are too sure about what is wrong. I fear I express myself very badly.”

Jean privately thought he did, but he could not very well say so; besides, he knew that he was in no danger from spiritual pride, he meant to be very humble and absolutely obedient, even to this rather foolish old man. It was a great sacrifice to Jean not to join the Third Order, but he never dreamed of doing so after his Confessor had advised him not to.

“If you can help it,” added his Confessor, “do not make up your mind very much about anything else, just now.”

“But do not you think it well to be definite, my father?” Jean asked, in great astonishment.

The old priest spoke quite firmly this time, it was the end of the interview.

“No, my son,” he said. “I do not think it well to be very definite; I think it better to be obedient. We all know a great deal—that is our danger; let us see that we do a little of it—this is our security.” And he dismissed Jean, to whom he had not given a single rule, at least Jean could not remember that he had.

CHAPTER VI

JEAN bore his new resolutions very easily at first; they filled up his days and they gave him an incentive, and for a time he did not come into contact with any other point of view.

“Voyons,” the concierge’s wife exclaimed to Henri, “you have sent us a saint. I am not the less careful of him on that account, you may imagine. For myself, I believe there is luck in such things. My husband is, as you know, a sceptic; he says that it will not last. Poor young man! I sometimes think to myself it is a little sad—so young and with so much to see, and always to be looking at Heaven!”

But Jean did not find it sad; he thought it was well to keep up his music—monks have been composers before now. So he spent all his spare time at the piano and bought the latest compositions of a famous Russian composer. One could hardly call his music strictly religious, perhaps, but Jean felt confident that it could be religiously applied. Then it occurred to him one day that he was a little selfish. Here he was, professedly conscious of a new truth, leading a splendid and invigorating life and making no attempt to share it. It was not that Jean wanted to preach; he was not a prig, even though he was very much in earnest; but he did want to do good and communicate, and he also wanted sympathy, but of this he was perhaps hardly aware. At twenty-one we are not likely to know very much about our own characters. We are too busy making them. Jean was extremely susceptible to sympathy. Appreciation and approval were like wings to his efforts, even opposition made life easier to him than indifference.

He could not really enjoy being a hermit without someone to say that it was, if not a great success, at least an astonishing attempt, and so far Jean had not surprised anyone in Paris. It came to him one Sunday afternoon with a flash of inspiration, why should he not reveal his new way of life to Maurice Golaud? He was almost certain to be in Paris now; he had said he would, as a matter of course, come up for the winter, and it was already late in December. It was improbable that Maurice would at once desire to share Jean’s austere existence, but he could discuss its charms with Maurice, and point out to him how disappointed he had been in what Maurice had called “life.” Perhaps by this time Maurice was disappointed too. At any rate, it would be very jolly to see Maurice again. He ought to go and see Maurice, and he re-read the address. The name Mademoiselle Liane de Brances meant nothing at all to Jean. He did not know that she was a lovely French actress, almost of the first class. How should he? As a hermit he had never entered the theatre, and in his pre-hermit days his fellow clerks had introduced him chiefly to music halls. He did think that it was a pity he should have to find Maurice at this lady’s address; he even thought of writing and arranging an appointment in his own room; but there was that fatal and entrapping confusion between desire and duty. Surely he ought not to waste any time in going to Maurice? He would waste no time—and he went.

Everything was different from what Jean had expected. To begin with, the maid did not think it necessary to inform Jean that Maurice was out; she knew her mistress to be alone and in a bad temper, and in these circumstances she had experienced before the extreme efficacy of a young man. He acted upon Liane’s nerves like a sedative, and Liane’s servants made a point of considering her nerves. So she took Jean’s card straight to her mistress and left him to make what he could of a fashionable actress’s boudoir, while he waited.

Maurice had often spoken to Jean of his “little place” in Paris, but Jean in his wildest dreams had never imagined a little place like this. The room was not very large, but it was extraordinarily light and gay. Great bowls full of scented flowers stood everywhere. Signed photographs of names that had reached even to St. Jouin were flung carelessly about, exquisite small ivories and dainty bonbonnières were set out on little tables. By the delicately curtained windows stood a screen of very fine old miniatures, and on a long, narrow table was a valuable collection of old snuff-boxes.

Everywhere were mirrors—long mirrors, short mirrors, round mirrors, oval mirrors; the tables and chairs were white and gold, and here and there on the walls hung toneless Japanese prints, pale grey, or white with wavy black lines.

There was only one painting in the room—it hung over the mantelpiece, and after Jean had looked at it he saw nothing else.

It was a painting of a woman. She seemed almost to speak as she leaned with bent head out of the picture. There was no smile on her face—lovely and blooming and intensely gay, there was about her an enormous and unlimited satisfaction. She seemed, as it were, clothed in a dauntless confidence. There she sat with uplifted shining eyes, waiting for her opportunity, and relentlessly competent to take it.

Jean heard a faint sound behind him, and turning, he saw the original of the picture.

Liane was fifteen years older now, and she was no longer waiting for her opportunity.

She was a tall woman, whose figure already required care; she had thick coils of magnificent chestnut hair, much of which was still her own.

Her arched eyebrows gave a questioning, mysterious look to her wide grey eyes with their deep bisque shadows. She had the most beautiful mouth in Paris, and she had been famous for her smile. Poets had sung of it, artists had tried to paint it, lovers had sworn they would die for it. They had not found that necessary, but many of them had found it remarkably expensive.

Ten years ago that smile of Liane’s was the talk of Paris, but perhaps rather too many other things had been talked of since. It was by now a little blurred, tightened by repetition, and hardened by inevitable usage, still even now it was a work of art, and, without the stage, it would have afforded Liane a handsome income. It was perhaps no mean test of a hermit.

Jean stood watching her with a hypnotized air; it was a great tribute to Liane, but as an attitude in a Parisian boudoir it was a trifle awkward.

Poor Jean! How beautiful this woman was,—and he had never seen a beautiful woman before.

Liane hardly seemed to move as she approached him; her figure glided through the room like the idle wing of a bird in slow flight across a summer sky. It had taken a danseuse two years to teach Liane how to walk.

She was dressed in a pale dove-grey tea-gown, with a knot of violets at her breast. It was not surprising that Maurice admired her more even than his own imperially cut and waxed moustache; nevertheless, he had gone to the courses this afternoon without her, and Liane de Brances did not like being left alone.

“Vous êtes le bien-venu, Monsieur,” said Liane, in the modulated musical tone which she had learned for the theatre. It was not her natural voice, and she looked at Jean with a soft enclosing look which seemed to shut out the world.

No woman is very dangerous to a man unless she is a little self-conscious, and Liane was so completely self-conscious that she could afford to be perfectly natural. She knew herself as an artist knows his picture or a captain his ship.

“I think you have fallen from heaven!” she said, sinking into a chaise longue and patting the cushions left and right of her into a suitable background. “Or if you have come from the other place that will be more amusing still! Think of it, Maurice has gone to the races, and left me alone in the rain! It was clothes of course—the clothes of a woman, Monsieur, are her tragedy. Mon Dieu! the life one leads! I can assure you, it is a slavery, and yet what can we do? For if one does not strain every nerve to succeed, it becomes a massacre! I believe I may truly say that every woman in the company would murder me with a new costume to-morrow if I did not put myself in the hands of the greatest tyrant in Paris. You know Madame Berthe, of course? She dresses half the world, and we must attempt to accommodate her. I was, then, at her house, if you will believe me, at ten o’clock this morning—an hour when I am never awake—I must have been driven there in my sleep, I fancy, and if I have caught a cold and ruined my voice, one sees very well why! And after I had sat there an hour—an hour!—and I am without exception the busiest woman in Paris—I am sent a message that she cannot see me until three! I assure you that for two pins I would have burst into her private room and destroyed all the costumes within sight! But I was handicapped by thoughts of the future; I restrained myself, and I return here furious. Maurice appears. I cannot accompany him to the courses; instead I have to go back to that infamous woman, or she won’t have the second act ready at all; as it is, I shall have to run in and out in pins. And they accuse us of being gay. What a calumny! No housewife works as I do. I have three parts a mile long to learn for next week, and I haven’t looked at one of them! Costumes! Costumes! And then a silly author appears at lunch expecting me to know his twaddle by heart and praise him for it. Oh la! la! the vanity of these men who expect gratitude in return for parts only fit for a sick crow! You have seen La Fin de l’Amour of course? I ask you frankly, how do I appear in it? You like it, hein? I assure you I can do better than that; but one is ruined of course by the rest of the cast. I told Colin so yesterday—the premier is so careless, he forgets half his words and apparently he imagines that the front of the stage was meant only for him. The less said of the women the better, it is a marvel to me they are not hissed off the stage. But my public are always good to me. You like it?”

How was Jean to explain that he had never heard of it, that even if he had, he should have avoided it, that this lady’s whole profession appeared to him to be wrong?

He hesitated, but he did not explain; he said:

“Then, Mademoiselle, you are an actress?”

Liane flung back her head and laughed and laughed.

“Oh, Mon Dieu! An actress—I?” she cried, when she could speak. “But do you not know me, then? Have you never heard of me? I am Liane de Brances? Ma foi, I did not expect to have to explain myself at this time of day! I am not a vain woman, but, Monsieur, Paris knows me!” And she dropped her eyes and lifted them again, with her head bent like the girl in the picture. She spoke no more than the truth. Paris did know her.

“Maurice told me you came from the country,” she added. “But it appears I had over-estimated what the country amuses itself with. Perhaps you have never seen an actress before?”

“Oh yes, I have,” said Jean, flushing a little, “but I have not before had the pleasure——” and he broke off, for Liane was laughing again.

“I am the first, then?” she exclaimed, with caressing mockery. “Really the first? And you are not afraid to meet a lady who is to be seen on the posters? Quel courage, Monsieur!”

Here was Jean’s opportunity presented to him afresh. Now was the time for him to tell Liane that he had come to see Maurice, and Maurice alone, and that his views of life were so different from her own as to make all future communications impossible between them.

Jean saw himself telling Liane this, he saw the incredulous amusement, the offended dignity, and his own ignominious retreat; and then, after all, would it be right to leave her like this? Perhaps if they became friends she might listen more sympathetically to his point of view. It never did to be premature. If he had but known it, this was his one opportunity of escape—women like Liane do not give a second opportunity. But he was fated never to tell her his point of view. He hesitated and was lost.