IN WHICH MR. ERWIN SEES PARIS

A MODERN CHRONICLE

CHAPTER I. WHAT'S IN HEREDITY

Honora Leffingwell is the original name of our heroine. She was born in
the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, at Nice, in France, and she
spent the early years of her life in St. Louis, a somewhat conservative
old city on the banks of the Mississippi River. Her father was Randolph
Leffingwell, and he died in the early flower of his manhood, while
filling with a grace that many remember the post of United States Consul
at Nice. As a linguist he was a phenomenon, and his photograph in the
tortoise-shell frame proves indubitably, to anyone acquainted with the
fashions of 1870, that he was a master of that subtlest of all arts,
dress. He had gentle blood in his veins, which came from Virginia
through Kentucky in a coach and six, and he was the equal in appearance
and manners of any duke who lingered beside classic seas.

Honora has often pictured to herself a gay villa set high above the
curving shore, the amethyst depths shading into emerald, laced with
milk-white foam, the vivid colours of the town, the gay costumes; the
excursions, the dinner-parties presided over by the immaculate young
consul in three languages, and the guests chosen from the haute noblesse
of Europe. Such was the vision in her youthful mind, added to by degrees
as she grew into young-ladyhood and surreptitiously became familiar
with the writings of Ouida and the Duchess, and other literature of an
educating cosmopolitan nature.

Honora's biography should undoubtedly contain a sketch of Mrs. Randolph
Leffingwell. Beauty and dash and a knowledge of how to seat a table seem
to have been the lady's chief characteristics; the only daughter of
a carefully dressed and carefully, preserved widower, likewise a
linguist,--whose super-refined tastes and the limited straits to which
he, the remaining scion of an old Southern family, had been reduced by a
gentlemanly contempt for money, led him 'to choose Paris rather than
New York as a place of residence. One of the occasional and carefully
planned trips to the Riviera proved fatal to the beautiful but reckless
Myrtle Allison. She, who might have chosen counts or dukes from the
Tagus to the Danube, or even crossed the Channel; took the dashing
but impecunious American consul, with a faith in his future that was
sublime. Without going over too carefully the upward path which led to
the post of their country's