coming to join me--he with his swinging stride, a gesture of
salutation, a laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured
spring toilets: I fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden
age. Then we would drink our _apéritifs_, our Turin bitter, perhaps
our absinthe, and go off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue's.

Godelinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done wonders by
way of civilising her. She had learned English, and prattled it with
an accent so quaint and sprightly as to give point to her otherwise
perhaps somewhat commonplace observations. She was fond of reading;
she could play a little; she was an excellent housewife, and generally
a very good-natured and quite presentable little person. She was
Parisian and adaptable. To meet her, you would never have suspected
her origin; you would have found it hard to believe that she had been
the wife of a drunken tailor, who used to beat her. One January night,
four or five years before, Pair had surprised this gentleman publicly
pummelling her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remonstrate; and
the husband went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling
the universe to witness that he would have the law of the meddling
stranger. Pair picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and
had only been married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had
fallen, half fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings,
which were at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered
study, for rather more than nine weeks, she lay on a bed of fever, the
consequence of blows, exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well
there was no talk of her leaving. Pair couldn't let her go back to her
tailor; he couldn't turn her into the streets. Besides, during the
months that he had nursed her, he had somehow conceived a great
tenderness for her; it made his heart burn with grief and anger to
think of what she had suffered in the past, and he yearned to sustain