, and I left the bureau in some
sickness. This increased so much (as I approached the Madeleine, where
I wished to mount an omnibus) that I entered a restaurant and drank a
small glass of cognac. Then I called for writing-papers and wrote to
the good Mother Superior and my dear little nieces at their convent. I
enclosed two hundred and fifty francs, which sum I had fallen behind in
my payments for their education and sustenance, and I felt a moment's
happiness that at least for a while I need not fear that my poor
brother's orphans might become objects of charity--a fear which,
accompanied by my own hunger, had led me to become the joke of the
boulevards.

Feeling rich with my remaining fifty francs, I ordered the waiter to
bring me a goulasch and a carafe of blond beer, after the consummation
of which I spent an hour in the reading of a newspaper. Can it be
credited that the journal of my perusement was the one which may be
called the North-American paper of the aristocracies of Europe? Also, it
contains some names of the people of the United States at the hotels and
elsewhere.

How eagerly I scanned those singular columns! Shall I confess to what
purpose? I read the long lists of uncontinental names over and over, but
I lingered not at all upon those like "Muriel," "Hermione,"
"Violet," and "Sibyl," nor over "Balthurst," "Skeffington-Sligo," and
"Covering-Legge"; no, my search was for the Sadies and Mamies, the
Thompsons, Van Dusens, and Bradys. In that lies my preposterous secret.

You will see to what infatuation those words of pity, that sense of a
beautiful presence, had led me. To fall in love must one behold a face?
Yes; at thirty. At twenty, when one is something of a poet--No: it
is sufficient to see a grey pongee skirt! At fifty, when one is a
philosopher--No: it is enough to perceive a soul! I had done both; I
had seen the skirt; I had perceived the soul! Therefore, while hungry, I
neglected my goulasch to read these lists of names of the United
States again and again, only that I might have the thought that one
of them--though I knew not which--might be this lady's, and that in so
infinitesimal a degree I had been near her again. Will it be estimated
extreme imbecility in me when I ventured the additional confession that
I felt a great warmth and tenderness toward the possessors of all these
names, as being, if not herself, at least her compatriots?

I am now brought to the admission that before to-day