from beneath, it had become ugly and meaningless since the introduction
of top lights.

The friend who took me everywhere in Paris landed me one night in the
dressing-room of a singer. I remember it because I heard her complain to
a man of some injustice. She had not got some engagement that she had
expected.

"It serves you damn right!" he answered. "You can't sing a bit." For the
first time I seemed to realize how brutal it was of a man to speak to a
woman like that, and I _hated_ it.

Long afterwards, in the same city, I saw a man sitting calmly in a
_fiacre_, a man of the "gentlemanly" class, and ordering the _cocher_ to
drive on, although a woman was clinging to the side of the carriage and
refusing to let go. She was a strong, splendid creature of the peasant
type, bareheaded, with a fine open brow, and she was obviously consumed
by resentment of some injustice--mad with it. She was dragged along in
one of the busiest streets in Paris, the little Frenchman sitting there
smiling, easy. How she escaped death I don't know. Then he became
conscious that people were looking, and he stopped the cab and let her
get in. Oh, men!

Paris! Paris! Young as I was, I fell under the spell, of your elegance,
your cleanness, your well-designed streets, your nonchalant gaiety. I
drank coffee at Tortoni's. I visited the studio of Meissonier. I stood
in the crowd that collected round Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair," which was
in the Salon that year. I grew dead sick of the endless galleries of the
Louvre. I went to the Madeleine at Easter time, all purple and white
lilies, and fainted from trying to imagine ecstasy when the Host was