craning her neck over a gutter swollen by the rain. But the hour was
not unpropitious for the indulgence of some discreditable whim.
Earlier, he might have been detected; later, he might find himself cut
out. Tempted by a glance which is encouraging without being inviting,
to have followed a young and pretty woman for an hour, or perhaps for
a day, thinking of her as a divinity and excusing her light conduct by
a thousand reasons to her advantage; to have allowed oneself to
believe in a sudden and irresistible affinity; to have pictured, under
the promptings of transient excitement, a love-adventure in an age
when romances are written precisely because they never happen; to have
dreamed of balconies, guitars, stratagems, and bolts, enwrapped in
Almaviva's cloak; and, after inditing a poem in fancy, to stop at the
door of a house of ill-fame, and, crowning all, to discern in Rosina's
bashfulness a reticence imposed by the police--is not all this, I say,
an experience familiar to many a man who would not own it?

The most natural feelings are those we are least willing to confess,
and among them is fatuity. When the lesson is carried no further, the
Parisian profits by it, or forgets it, and no great harm is done. But
this would hardly be the case with this foreigner, who was beginning
to think he might pay too dearly for his Paris education.

This personage was a Milanese of good family, exiled from his native
country, where some "liberal" pranks had made him an object of
suspicion to the Austrian Government. Count Andrea Marcosini had been
welcomed in Paris with the cordiality, essentially French, that a man
always finds there, when he has a pleasant wit, a sounding name, two
hundred thousand francs a year, and a prepossessing person. To such a
man banishment could but be a pleasure tour; his property was simply
sequestrated, and his friends let him know that after an absence of