is youthful days in France while he was a student whose
parents fondly expected him to conquer the world, came to his aid, and
besides he had saturated himself all his life with poetry and romance.
Scudery, Scarron, Prevost, Madame La Fayette and Calprenede were the
chief sources of his information touching the life and manners, morals
and gayeties of people who, as he supposed, stirred the surface of that
resplendent and far-off ocean called society. Nothing suited him better
than to smoke a pipe and talk about what he had seen and done; and the
less he had really seen and done the more he had to tell.

His broad, almost over-virile, kindly and contented face beamed with
the warmth of wholly imaginary recollections while he recounted with
minute circumstantiality to the delighted Alice his gallant adventures
in the crowded and brilliant ball-rooms of the French-Canadian towns.
The rolling burr of his bass voice, deep and resonant, gave force to
the improvised descriptions.

Madame Roussillon heard the heavy booming and presently came softly
back into the door from the kitchen to listen. She leaned against the
facing in an attitude of ponderous attention, a hand, on her bulging
hip. She could not suppress her unbounded admiration of her liege
lord's manly physique, and jealous to fierceness as she was of his
experiences so eloquently and picturesquely related, her woman's nature
took fire with enjoyment of the scenes described.

This is the mission of the poet and the romancer--to sponge out of
existence, for a time, the stiff, refractory, and unlovely realities
and give in their place a scene of ideal mobility and charm. The two
women reveled in Gaspard Roussillon's revelations. They saw the
brilliant companies, the luxurious surroundings, heard the rustle of
brocade and the fine flutter of laces, the hum of sweet voices,
breathed in the wafts of costly perfumeries, looked on while the
dancers whirled and flickered in the confusion of lights; and over all
and through all poured and vibrated such ravishing music as only the
southern imagination could have conjured up out of nothing.

Alice was absolutely charmed. She sat on a low wooden stool and gazed
into Gaspard Roussillon's face with dilating eyes in which burned that
rich and radiant something we call a passionate soul. She drank in his
flamboyant stream of words with a thirst which nothing but experience
could ever quench. He felt her silent applause and the ad