Zora accompanied
them on their rounds. They lunched and dined in the latest expensive
restaurants in the Champs Elysees and the Bois; they went to races; they
walked up and down the Rue de la Paix and the Avenue de l'Opera and visited
many establishments where the female person is adorned. After the theater
they drove to the Cabarets of Montmartre, where they met other Americans
and English, and felt comfortably certain that they were seeing the
naughty, shocking underside of Paris. They also went to the Louvre and to
the Tomb of Napoleon. They stayed at the Grand Hotel.

Zora saw little of Septimus. He knew Paris in a queer, dim way of his own,
and lived in an obscure hotel, whose name Zora could not remember, on the
other side of the river. She introduced him to the Callenders, and they
were quite prepared to receive him into their corporation. But he shrank
from so vast a concourse as six human beings; he seemed to be overawed by
the multitude of voices, unnerved by the multiplicity of personalities. The
unfeathered owl blinked dazedly in general society as the feathered one
does in daylight. At first he tried to stand the glare for Zora's sake.

"Come out and mix with people and enjoy yourself," cried Zora, when he was
arguing against a proposal to join the party on a Versailles excursion. "I
want you to enjoy yourself for once in your life. Besides--you're always so
anxious to be human. This will make you human."

"Do you think it will?" he asked seriously. "If you do, I'll come."

But at Versailles they lost him, and the party, as a party, knew him no
more. What he did with himself in Paris Zora could not imagine. A Cambridge
acquaintance--one of the men on his staircase who had not yet terminated
his disastrous career--ran across him in the Boulevard Sevastopol.

"Why--if it isn't the Owl! What are you doing?"

"Oh--hooting," said Septimus.

Which was more information as to his activities than he vouchsafed to give
Zora. Once he murmured something about a friend whom he saw occasionally.
When she asked him where his friend lived he waved an indeterminate hand
eastwards and said, "There!" It was a friend, thought Zora, of whom he had
no reason to be proud, for he prevented further questioning by adroitly
changing the conversation to the price of hams.

"But what are you going to do with hams?"

"Nothing," said Septimus, "but when I see hams hanging up in a shop I
always want to buy them. They look so shin