ses filled with foreign grasses, and
palms stood in the corners of the rooms. Marshall pulled out a few
pictures; but he paid very little heed to my compliments; and, sitting down
at the piano, with a great deal of splashing and dashing about the keys, he
rattled off a waltz.

"What waltz is that?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing; something I composed the other evening. I had a fit of the
blues, and didn't go out. What do you think of it?"

"I think it beautiful; did you really compose that the other evening?"

At this moment a knock was heard at the door, and a beautiful English girl
entered. Marshall introduced me. With looks that see nothing, and words
that mean nothing, an amorous woman receives the man she finds with her
sweetheart. But it subsequently transpired that Alice had an appointment,
that she was dining out. She would, however, call in the morning, and give
him a sitting for the portrait he was painting of her.

I had hitherto worked very regularly and attentively at the studio, but now
Marshall's society was an attraction I could not resist. For the sake of
his talent, which I religiously believed in, I regretted he was so idle;
but his dissipation was winning, and his delight was thorough, and his gay,
dashing manner made me feel happy, and his experience opened to me new
avenues for enjoyment and knowledge of life. On my arrival in Paris I had
visited, in the company of my taciturn valet, the Mabille and the
Valentino, and I had dined at the Maison d'Or by myself; but now I was
taken to strange students' _cafes_, where dinners were paid for in
pictures; to a mysterious place, where a _table d'hote_ was held under
a tent in a back garden; and afterwards we went in great crowds to
_Bullier_, the _Chateau Rouge_, or the _Elysee Montmartre_.
The clangour of the band, the unreal greenness of the foliage, the
thronging of the dancers, and the chattering of women, whose Christian
names we only knew. And then the returning in open carriages rolling
through the white dust beneath the immense heavy dome of the summer night,
when the dusty darkness of the street is chequered by a passing glimpse of
light skirt or flying feather, and the moon looms like a magic lantern out
of the sky.

Now we seemed to live in fiacres and restaurants, and the afternoons were
filled with febrile impressions. Marshall had a friend in this street, and
another in that. It was only necessary for him to cry "Stop" to the
coachman, and to r