with the concierge's wife, who bristled with interesting suspicions, she
vanished into Paris.

The weather was even more superb than on the previous day. Paris glittered
around her as she drove, slowly, in a horse-taxi, to the Place de l'Opéra
on the right bank, where the _grand boulevard_ meets the Avenue de l'Opéra
and the Rue de la Paix. Here was the very centre of the fashionable and
pleasure-ridden district which the Quarter held in noble scorn. She had
seen it before, because she had started a banking account (under advice
from Mr. Foulger), and the establishment of her bankers was situate at the
corner of the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Rue de la Paix. But she knew
little of the district, and such trifling information as she had acquired
was tinged by the natural hostility of a young woman who for over six
months, with no compulsion to do so, had toiled regularly and fiercely in
the pursuit of knowledge. She paid off the cab, and went to test the
soundness of her bankers. The place was full of tourists, and in one
department of it young men in cages, who knew not the Quarter, were
counting, and ladling, and pinning together, and engorging, and dealing
forth, the currency and notes of all the great nations of the earth. The
spectacle was inspiring.

In half a year the restive but finally obedient Mr. Foulger had sent three
thousand pounds to Paris in the unpoetic form of small oblong pieces of
paper signed with his own dull signature. Audrey desired to experience the
thrill of authentic money. She waited some time in front of a cage, with
her cheque-book open on the counter, until a young man glanced at her
interrogatively through the bars.

"How much money have I got here, please?" she asked. She ought to have
said: "What is my balance, please?" But nobody had taught her the sacred