ances of it were almost ideal. For a week the deeply experienced
connoisseur of all the arts had had the fine, eager, responsive virgin
mind hi his power. Day after day he had watched and guided it amid
entirely new sensations. Never had Mr. Enwright enjoyed himself more
purely, and at the close he knew with satisfaction that he had put Paris
in a proper perspective for George, and perhaps saved the youth from
years of groping misapprehension. As for George, all his preconceived
notions about Paris had been destroyed or shaken. In the quadrangles of
the Louvre, for example, Mr. Enwright, pointing to the under part of the
stone bench that foots so much of the walls, had said: "Look at that
curve." Nothing else. No ecstasies about the sculptures of Jean Goujon
and Carpeaux, or about the marvellous harmony of the East facade! But a
flick of the cane towards the half-hidden moulding! And George had felt
with a thrill what an exquisite curve and what an original curve and
what a modest curve that curve was. Suddenly and magically his eyes had
been opened. Or it might have been that a deceitful mist had rolled away
and the real Louvre been revealed in its esoteric and sole authentic
beauty....

"Why don't you try Chelsea?" said Mr. Enwright over his shoulder,
proceeding towards the stairs.

"I was thinking of Chelsea."

"You were!" Mr. Enwright halted again for an instant. "It's the only
place in London where the structure of society is anything like Paris.
Why, dash it, in the King's Road the grocers know each other's
business!" Mr. Enwright made the last strange remark to the outer door,
and vanished.

"Funny cove!" George commented tolerantly to Mr. Haim, who passed
through the room immediately afterwards to his nightly task of
collecting and inspecting the scattered instruments on the principal's
august drawing-board.

But Mr. Haim, though possibly he smiled ever so little, would not
compromise himself by an endorsement of the criticism of his employer.
George was a mere incident in the eternal career of Mr. Haim at Lucas &
Enwright's.

When the factotum came back into the pupils' room, George stood up
straight and smoothed his trousers and gazed admiringly at his elegant
bright socks.

"Let me see," said George in a very friendly manner. "_You_ live
somewhere in Chelsea, don't you?"

"Yes," answered Mr. Haim.

"Whereabouts, if it isn't a rude question?"

"Well," said Mr. Haim, confidentially and benignantly