raceful at
the time of her first disgrace. But, loafing about in Paris, on her
pocket-money and on the allowance that old Hurlbird made him to keep out
of the United States, had given him a stomach like a man of forty, and
dyspeptic irritation on top of it. God, how they worked me! It was
those two between them who really elaborated the rules. I have told you
something about them--how I had to head conversations, for all those
eleven years, off such topics as love, poverty, crime, and so on. But,
looking over what I have written, I see that I have unintentionally
misled you when I said that Florence was never out of my sight. Yet
that was the impression that I really had until just now. When I come to
think of it she was out of my sight most of the time.

You see, that fellow impressed upon me that what Florence needed most
of all were sleep and privacy. I must never enter her room without
knocking, or her poor little heart might flutter away to its doom. He
said these things with his lugubrious croak, and his black eyes like
a crow's, so that I seemed to see poor Florence die ten times a day--a
little, pale, frail corpse. Why, I would as soon have thought of
entering her room without her permission as of burgling a church. I
would sooner have committed that crime. I would certainly have done it
if I had thought the state of her heart demanded the sacrilege. So at
ten o'clock at night the door closed upon Florence, who had gently,
and, as if reluctantly, backed up that fellow's recommendations; and
she would wish me good night as if she were a cinquecento Italian lady
saying good-bye to her lover. And at ten o'clock of the next morning
there she would come out the door of her room as fresh as Venus rising
from any of the couches that are mentioned in Greek legends.

Her room door was locked because she was nervous about thieves; but
an electric contrivance on a cord was understood to be attached to her
little wrist. She had only to press a bulb to raise the house. And I was
provided with an axe--an axe!--great gods, with which to break down her
door in case she ever failed to answer my knock, after I knocked really
loud several times. It was pretty well thought out, you see.

What wasn't so well thought out were the ultimate consequences--our
being tied to Europe. For that young man rubbed it so well into me that
Florence would die if she crossed the Channel--he impressed it so fully
on my mind that, when later Floren