that I know enough about Paris to find my way about."

"Humph!" ejaculated Cassandra. "What a foolish little thing you are! You
don't imagine that the Paris of to-day is the Paris of your time, or even
the Paris of that sweet child Trilby's time, do you? If you do you are
very much mistaken. I almost wish I had not warned you of your danger and
had let you go, just to see those eyes of yours open with amazement at the
change. You'd find your Louvre a very different sort of a place from what
it used to be, my dear lady. Those pleasing little windows through which
your relations were wont in olden times to indulge in target practice at
people who didn't go to their church are now kept closed; the galleries
which used to swarm with people, many of whom ought to have been hanged,
now swarm with pictures, many of which ought not to have been hung; the
romance which clung about its walls is as much a part of the dead past as
yourselves, and were you to materialize suddenly therein you would find
yourselves jostled and hustled and trodden upon by the curious from other
lands, with Argus eyes taking in five hundred pictures a minute, and
traversing those halls at a rate of speed at which Mercury himself would
stand aghast."

"But my beloved Tuileries?" cried Marie Antoinette.

"Has been swallowed up by a play-ground for the people, my dear," said
Cassandra, gently. "Paris is no place for us, and it is the intention of
these men, in whose hands we are, to take us there and then desert us. Can
you imagine anything worse than ourselves, the phantoms of a glorious
romantic past, basely deserted in the streets of a wholly strange,
superficial, material city of to-day? What do you think, Elizabeth, would
be your fate if, faint and famished, you begged for sustenance at an
English door to-day, and when asked your name and profession were to