He placed it on his table, and opened it by cautiously cutting away pieces of its sides with his pocket-knife. When all the cardboard had been cut away, there stood upon his table, crown-side down, and filled with scarlet amaryllis, a hat, a magnificent hat, an elegant hat, a formidable hat, a hat which was all there was of chic, a genuine glistening stove-pipe hat, an authentic hat of eight reflections.
Ventrillon stared. It was really true that he was higher in the favour of the Belletaille than ever. He was probably the most talked-of person in Paris. He could that afternoon begin another portrait, and a greater celebrity than he had ever hoped for was within his grasp. There was even before him on his table a shining hat of eight reflections in which to walk before the admiring eyes of tout Paris.
Now the concierge, who, fascinated, had remained behind to peek in at the crack of the door, saw a strange thing. When she reported it eagerly to him that evening, her worthy spouse remarked that now he knew what had become of that bottle of eau-de-vie his uncle had sent up from the country, and he was not a man to be taken in by a woman’s lies, even when she was sober.
Slinging its contents of scarlet amaryllis about the floor, Ventrillon snatched the hat from the table, placed it accurately in the seat of his chair, and sat upon it.
“It is curious, old fellow,” he reflected aloud, without rising from the inchoate mass it had become—“it is curious how strange one always feels when one discovers that one has been human. But to-night you and I—you and I are going together to the Closerie des Lilas. May the francs in my pocket persuade our friends to be merciful!”
So far as the concierge could ascertain, he was addressing a rusty, broad-brimmed black felt hat which hung shapeless from a nail on the opposite wall.
HOME-BREW
By GRACE SARTWELL MASON
From Saturday Evening Post
“OF COURSE, they’re all dears, my family,” said Alyse; “but as fiction material there is nothing to them; no drama, you know; no colour; just nice, ordinary, unimaginative dears. They’re utterly unstimulating. That’s why I can’t live at home, and create. They don’t understand it, poor dears; but what could I possibly find to write about at home?”
She crushed down upon her hair, with its Russian bob, a sad-coloured hat of hand-woven stuff, and locked the door of a somewhat crumby room over the Rossetti Hand-Loom Shop, where she worked half time for a half living. A secondhand typewriter accounted for the other half; or, to be quite truthful, for a fraction of the other half. For her father, plain George Todd, helped out when the typewriter failed to provide.