It was the end of April, and Paris rustled gaily in her spring dress. Stefan and Adolph, clad in disreputable baggy trousers topped in one case by a painter's blouse and in the other by an infinitely aged alpaca jacket, strolled homeward in the early evening from their favorite café.
Adolph was in the highest spirits, as he had been ever since Stefan's arrival three weeks before, but the other's face wore a rather moody frown. He had begun to weary a little of his good friend's ecstatic pleasure in their reunion.
He was in Paris again, in his old attic; it was spring, and his beloved city as beautiful as ever. He had expected a return of his old-time gaiety, but somehow the charm lacked potency. He wanted to paint, but his ideas were turgid and fragmentary. He wanted excitement, but the city only seemed to offer memories. The lapse of a short eighteen months had scattered his friends surprisingly. Adolph remained, but Nanette was married. Louise had left Paris, and Giddens, the English painter, had gone back to London. Perhaps it was the spring, perhaps it was merely the law which decrees that the past can never be recaptured—whatever the cause, Stefan's flight had not wholly assuaged his restlessness. Of adventures in the hackneyed sense he had not thought. He was too fastidious for the vulgar sort, and had hitherto met no women who stirred his imagination. Moreover, he harbored the delusion that the failure of his great romance had killed his capacity for love. “I am done with women,” he said to himself.
Mary seemed very distant. He thought of her with gratitude for her generosity, with regret, but without longing.
“Never marry,” he said to Adolph for the twentieth time, as they turned into the rue des Trois Ermites; “the wings of an artist must remain unbound.”
“Ah, Stefan,” Adolph replied, sighing over his friend's disillusionment, “I am not like you. I should be grateful for a home, and children. I am only a cricket scraping out my little music, not an eagle.”
Stefan snorted. “You are a great violinist, but you won't realize it. Look here, Adolph, chuck your job, and go on a walking tour with me. Let's travel through France and along the Riviera to Italy. I'm sick of cities. There's lots of money for us both, and if we run short, why, bring your fiddle along and play it—why not?”
At their door the concierge handed Adolph some letters.
“My friend,” said he, holding up a couple of bills, “one cannot slip away from life so easily. How should I pay my way when we returned?”
“Hang it,” said Stefan impatiently, “don't you begin to talk obligations. I came to France to get away from all that. Have a little imagination, Adolph. It would be the best thing that could happen to you to get shaken out of that groove at the Opera—be the making of you.”