early be of no use now. Now was the moment to cheer and
encourage him; to reassure him as to his own undiminished powers and
popularity, for he talked dejectedly of himself as obsolete and passing
out of fashion; to convince him also of the impossibility that the
ungrateful publisher whom Savarin's more brilliant successes had
enriched could encounter the odium of hostile proceedings; and to
remind him of all the authors, all the artists, whom he in their earlier
difficulties had so liberally assisted, and from whom a sum sufficing to
pay the bourgeois creditor when the day arrived could now be honourably
asked and would be readily contributed. In this last suggestion the
homely prudent good-sense of Madame Savarin failed her. She did not
comprehend that delicate pride of honour which, with all his Parisian
frivolities and cynicism, dignified the Parisian man of genius. Savarin
could not, to save his neck from a rope, have sent round the begging-hat
to friends whom he had obliged. Madame Savarin was one of those women
with large-lobed ears, who can be wonderfully affectionate, wonderfully
sensible, admirable wives and mothers, and yet are deficient in artistic
sympathies with artistic natures. Still, a really good honest wife is
such an incalculable blessing to her lord, that, at the end of the talk
in the solitary alley, this man of exquisite finesse, of the undefinably
high-bred temperament, and, alas! the painful morbid susceptibility,
which belongs to the genuine artistic character, emerged into the open
sunlit lawn with his crest uplifted, his lip curved upward in its joyous
mockery, and perfectly persuaded that somehow or other he should put
down the offensive publisher, and pay off the unoffending creditor when
the day for payment came. Still he had judgment enough to know that to
do this he must get back to Paris, and could not dawdle away precious
hours in discussing the principles of poetry with Graham Vane.

There was only one thing, apart from "the begging-hat," in which Savarin
dissented from his wife.--She suggested his starting a new journal in
conjunction with Gustave Rameau, upon whose genius and the expectations
to be formed from it (here she was tacitly thinking of Isaura wedded to
Rameau, and more than a Malibran on the stage) she insisted vehemently.
Savarin did not thus estimate Gustave Rameau, thought him a clever,
promising young writer in a very bad school of writing, who might do
well some day o