within me and sought for utterance with a strange unintermittingness of
appeal. I yearned merely to give direct expression to my pain. Life was
then in its springtide; every thought was new to me, and it would have
seemed a pity to disguise even the simplest emotion in any garment when it
was so beautiful in its Eden-like nakedness. The creatures whom I met in
the ways and by ways of Parisian life, whose gestures and attitudes I
devoured with my eyes, and whose souls I hungered to know, awoke in me a
tense irresponsible curiosity, but that was all,--I despised, I hated them,
thought them contemptible, and to select them as subjects of artistic
treatment, could not then, might never, have occurred to me, had the
suggestion to do so not come direct to me from the outside.

At the time I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned hotel on the
Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian had lately bought and was
endeavouring to modernise; an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its
ancient character in the presence of half a dozen old people, who, for
antediluvian reasons, continue to dine on certain well-specified days at
the _table d'hôte_. Fifteen years have passed away, and these old
people, no doubt, have joined their ancestors; but I can see them still
sitting in that _salle à manger_; the _buffets en vieux chêne_;
the opulent candelabra _en style d'empire_; the waiter lighting the
gas in the pale Parisian evening. That white-haired man, that tall, thin,
hatchet-faced American, has dined at this _table d'hôte_ for the last
thirty years--he is talkative, vain, foolish, and authoritative. The clean,
neatly-dressed old gentleman who sits by him, looking so much like a French
gentleman, has spent a great part of his life in Spain. With that piece of
news, and its subsequent developments, your acquaintance with him begins
and ends; the eyes, the fan, the mantilla, how it began, how it was broken
off, and how it began again. Opposite sits another French gentleman, with
beard and bristly hair. He spent twenty years of his life in India, and he