nt de moi?

'Je t'aime!' and with fumbling fingers he untied the strings of the
portfolio.

And now was Paul Armstrong the tame cat of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth,
and earned his title well in many cities, from St Petersburg to Cadiz,
and from London to Cairo.

CHAPTER XXIII

It would appear that in the course of time Gertrude grew a little tired
of Paul's ceaseless devotion. It is quite likely that she sometimes
found him in the way, and she was deprived of her best conversational
theme. It was of no use to try to revive the legend of the Isolated Soul
any longer, because of the frequent and earnest confession which had
been made of the final discovery of a spiritual rapport absolute and
complete. Paul and his angel had lived on terms of so much intimacy that
they had earned the right to be acidulous with each other upon occasion.
Her pruderies and her abandonments of prudery afforded between them an
atmosphere as unwholesome as it was easily possible for a man of
fervent temperament to live in. Work of the hard and healthful sort was
practically abandoned. There was a good deal of verse-turning done, and
an anonymous volume of sonnets entitled 'Dialogues of the Soul' made a
momentary splash on the surface of the literary deep, and then sank like
a pebble to the bottom. The book distilled a faint odour of eroticism,
a scent of the epicene; but the degenerates, sniffing it, thought poorly
of it because of its want of downright rancidity, and the people of
whom crowds are made misliked it for a better reason. Paul, with a
diminishing exchequer, found himself aware of the first flat literary
failure of his lifetime.

The exchequer failed rapidly, and there were several contributory
reasons. In the first place, the Baroness had any amount of money to
spend, and it was essential that anyone who aspired to follow her about
the capitals of Europe on equal terms should live at a high rate. Then,
Annette had proclaimed her rights of freedom, and had escaped from
Laurent and his forces, and had run up bills in Paris, and in London,
and elsewhere. The most successful of comedies will pass out of vogue.
To be idle, to be extravagant in one's own person, and to be milked
perpetually by the extravagance of another--could better ways to ruin be
discovered?

The two had their first real tiff at Naples on a Christmas Eve. Gertrude
had set up a sheep-dog in the person of one Mrs. Diedrich, a sour and
sallow remnant of New E