ice
had spoken four words to me.

"Je vous remercie, monsieur," it said.

"Pas de quoi!" I murmured.

The American trousers in a loud tone made reference in the idiom to my
miserable head: "Did you ever see anything to beat it?"

The beautiful voice answered, and by the gentleness of her sorrow for me
I knew she had no thought that I might understand. "Come away. It is too
pitiful!"

Then the grey skirt and the little round-toed shoes beneath it passed
from my sight, quickly hidden from me by the increasing crowd; yet I
heard the voice a moment more, but fragmentarily: "Don't you see how
ashamed he is, how he must have been starving before he did that, or
that someone dependent on him needed--"

I caught no more, but the sweetness that this beautiful lady understood
and felt for the poor absurd wretch was so great that I could have wept.
I had not seen her face; I had not looked up--even when she went.

"Who is she?" cried a scoundrel voyous, just as she turned. "Madame of
the parasol? A friend of monsieur of the ornamented head?"

"No. It is the first lady in waiting to his wife, Madame la Duchesse,"
answered a second. "She has been sent with an equerry to demand of
monseigneur if he does not wish a little sculpture upon his dome as well
as the colour decorations!"

"'Tis true, my ancient?" another asked of me.

I made no repartee, continuing to sit with my chin dependent upon my
cravat, but with things not the same in my heart as formerly to the
arrival of that grey pongee, the grey glove, and the beautiful voice.

Since King Charles the Mad, in Paris no one has been completely free
from lunacy while the spring-time is happening. There is something in
the sun and the banks of the Seine. The Parisians drink sweet and fruity
champagne because the good wines are already in their veins. These
Parisians are born intoxicated and remain so; it is not fair play to
require them to be like other human people. Their deepest feeling is
for the arts; and, as everyone had declared, they are farceurs in their
tragedies, tragic in their comedies. They prepare the last epigram in
the tumbril; they drown themselves with enthusiasm about the alliance
with Russia. In death they are witty; in war they have poetic spasms; in
love they are mad.

The strangest of all this is that it is not only the Parisians who are
the insane ones in Paris; the visitors are none of them in behaviour as
elsewhere. You have only to go there to