he Boulevard.
The Palais Royal, now so dishonoured and disavowed, was then the very
Paris of Paris; the shutters of the shops seemed taken down, at that
hour, for our especial benefit, and I remember well how, the "dressing"
of so large a number of the compact and richly condensed fronts being
more often than not a matter of diamonds and pearls, rubies and
sapphires, that represented, in their ingenuities of combination and
contortion, the highest taste of the time, I found open to me any amount
of superior study of the fact that the spell of gems seemed for the
feminine nature almost alarmingly boundless. I stared too, it comes back
to me, at these exhibitions, and perhaps even thought it became a young
man of the world to express as to this or that object a refined and
intelligent preference; but what I really most had before me was the
chorus of abjection, as I might well have called it, led, at the highest
pitch, by Honorine and vaguely suggesting to me, by the crudity, so to
say, of its wistfulness, a natural frankness of passion--goodness knew
in fact (for my small intelligence really didn't) what depths of
corruptibility. Droll enough, as I win them again, these queer dim plays
of consciousness: my sense that my innocent companions, Honorine _en
tete_, would have done anything or everything for the richest ruby, and
that though one couldn't one's self be decently dead to that richness
one didn't at all know what "anything" might be or in the least what
"everything" was. The gushing cousins, at the same time, assuredly knew
still less of that, and Honorine's brave gloss of a whole range alike of
possibilities and actualities was in itself a true social grace.

They all enjoyed, in fine, while I somehow but wastefully mused--which
was after all my form of enjoyment; I was shy for it, though it was a
truth and perhaps odd enough withal, that I didn't really at all care
for gems, that rubies and pearls, in no matter what collocations, left
me comparatively cold; that I actually cared for them about as little
as, monstrously, secretly, painfully, I cared for flowers. Later on I
was to become aware that I "adored" trees and architectural
marbles--that for a sufficient slab of a sufficiently rare, sufficiently
bestreaked or empurpled marble in particular I would have given a bag of
rubies; but by then the time had passed for my being troubled to make
out what in that case would represent on a small boy's part the
corrup