"I must air the place," the concierge muttered, "or else M. Gurn won't be pleased when he comes back. He always says he is too hot and can't breathe in Paris."
"So he does not live here regularly?" said the stranger, scanning the place curiously as he spoke.
"Oh, no, sir," the concierge answered. "M. Gurn is a kind of commercial traveller and is often away, sometimes for a month or six weeks together," and the gossiping woman was beginning a long and incoherent story when the stranger interrupted her, pointing to a silver-framed photograph of a young woman he had noticed on the mantelpiece.
"Is that Mme. Gurn?"
"M. Gurn is a bachelor," Mme. Doulenques replied. "I can't fancy him married, with his roaming kind of life."
"Just a little friend of his, eh?" said the man in the soft hat, with a wink and a meaning smile.
"Oh, no," said the concierge, shaking her head. "That photograph is not a bit like her."
"So you know her, then?"
"I do and I don't. That's to say, when M. Gurn is in Paris, he often has visits from a lady in the afternoon: a very fashionable lady, I can tell you, not the sort that one often sees in this quarter. Why, the woman who comes is a society lady, I am sure: she always has her veil down and passes by my lodge ever so fast, and never has any conversation with me; free with her money, too: it's very seldom she does not give me something when she comes."
The stranger seemed to find the concierge's communications very interesting, but they did not interrupt his mental inventory of the room.