“Ah, yes,” said I, “I have read Gautier, and that is a very good monograph of Marion Crawford’s. I was there once myself.”
“Were you?” said Mrs. Denby, demurely. “Do you take sugar?”
“Oh, tell me!” I began, for I saw I was expected to show some interest.
“Don’t, Dick,” began Mrs. Denby.
“Oh, it’s only Tom,” said Denby, fondly; but not half so fondly as he had before he had found her, and persuaded her, and—I always have had such bad luck with the woman whom it’s worth while trying to marry!
“You see,—it’s a silly story. Dick’s usually are,” began Mrs. Denby.
“Oh, fiddlesticks!” said Denby. “Now, you know—”
“Oh, if you must,” said Mrs. Denby, despairfully.
“Paris was a glare of splendor that February,—after the North Atlantic,” Denby went on. “Did you ever leave New York of a dismal day of winter fog and a week after find yourself in Havre? The boulevards are gay, the shops resplendent. Paris is a different place from Paris in July,—when hordes of our countrymen swoop down on it like the Huns. It’s like the rural visitor doing Fifth Avenue in August, and wondering why New York is so much talked about. But Paris in February is the Paris one dreams of when the word is pronounced, with all its suggestiveness of the world’s gayety. Yet, it was cold that February,—as bitter as in New York; and after coming back one night to my lodging on the Avenue Carnot, where the cab was unable to make its way because of the frozen sleet on the smooth paving of the hill the Avenue des Champs Elysées climbs,—that night I concluded I had not intended exchanging New York for wintry unpleasantness, and decided to go to Constantinople. Constantinople, where I had never been, seemed so far away, and I did not know that it, too, could be bleakly dismal in the spring. The next morning I booked on the Orient Express. That evening I was snugly put away in my compartment, and the morning after was looking on a Bavarian landscape.”
“You always were impulsive,” Mrs. Denby interrupted.