It is a great temptation, when you have duly slain your first hero, to enrich hero number two beyond the dreams of avarice, and provide him with a title and a castle and park, as well as a handsome wife and a nice family! But truth is inexorable—and, besides, they are just as happy as they are.
They are well off enough, anyhow, to spend a week in Paris at last, and even to stop at the Grand Hôtel! now that two of their sons are at Harrow (where their father was before them), and the third is safe at a preparatory school at Elstree, Herts.
It is their first outing since the honeymoon, and the Laird should have come with them.
But the good Laird of Cockpen (who is now a famous Royal Academician) is preparing for a honeymoon of his own. He has gone to Scotland to be married himself—to wed a fair and clever country-woman of just a suitable age, for he has known her ever since she was a bright little lassie in short frocks, and he a promising A.R.A. (the pride of his native Dundee)—a marriage of reason, and well-seasoned affection, and mutual esteem—and therefore sure to turn out a happy one! and in another fortnight or so the pair of them will very possibly be sitting to breakfast opposite each other at that very corner table in the court-yard of the Grand Hôtel! and she will laugh at everything he says—and they will live happily ever after.
So much for hero number three—D'Artagnan! Here's to you, Sandy McAlister, canniest, genialest, and most humorous of Scots! most delicate, and dainty, and fanciful of British painters! "I trink your health, mit your family's—may you lif long—and brosper!"
So Taffy and his wife have come for their second honeymoon, their Indian-summer honeymoon, alone; and are well content that it should be so. Two's always company for such a pair—the amusing one and the amusable!—and they are making the most of it!
They have been all over the quartier latin, and revisited the well-remembered spots; and even been allowed to enter the old studio, through the kindness of the concierge (who is no longer Madame Vinard). It is tenanted by two American painters, who are coldly civil on being thus disturbed in the middle of their work.
The studio is very spick and span, and most respectable. Trilby's foot, and the poem, and the sheet of plate-glass have been improved away, and a bookshelf put in their place. The new concierge (who has only been there a year) knows nothing of Trilby, and of the Vinards, only that they are rich and prosperous, and live somewhere in the south of France, and that Monsieur Vinard is mayor of his commune. Que le bon Dieu les bénisse! c'étaient de bien braves gens.
Then Mr. and Mrs. Taffy have also been driven (in an open calèche with two horses) through the Bois de Boulogne to St. Cloud; and to Versailles, where they lunched at the Hôtel des Réservoirs—parlez-moi de ça! and to St. Germain, and to Meudon (where they lunched at la loge du garde champêtre—a new one); they have visited the Salon, the Louvre, the porcelain manufactory at Sèvres, the Gobelins, the Hôtel Cluny, the Invalides, with Napoleon's tomb, and seen half a dozen churches, including Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle; and dined with the Dodors at their charming villa near Asnières, and with the Zouzous at the splendid Hôtel de la Rochemartel, and with the Duriens in the Parc Monceau (Dodor's food was best and Zouzou's worst; and at Durien's the company and talk were so good that one forgot to notice the food—and that was a pity). And the young Dodors are all right—and so are the young Duriens. As for the young Zouzous, there aren't any—and that's a relief.
And they've been to the Variétés and seen Madame Chaumont, and to the Français and seen Sarah Bernhardt and Côquelin and Delaunay, and to the Opéra and heard Monsieur Lassalle.