to the life she had led with the Farlows, during the
interregnum between the Hoke and Murrett eras, called up
before him a queer little corner of Parisian existence. The
Farlows themselves--he a painter, she a "magazine writer"--
rose before him in all their incorruptible simplicity: an
elderly New England couple, with vague yearnings for
enfranchisement, who lived in Paris as if it were a
Massachusetts suburb, and dwelt hopefully on the "higher
side" of the Gallic nature. With equal vividness she set
before him the component figures of the circle from which
Mrs. Farlow drew the "Inner Glimpses of French Life"
appearing over her name in a leading New England journal:
the Roumanian lady who had sent them tickets for her
tragedy, an elderly French gentleman who, on the strength of
a week's stay at Folkestone, translated English fiction for
the provincial press, a lady from Wichita, Kansas, who
advocated free love and the abolition of the corset, a
clergyman's widow from Torquay who had written an "English
Ladies' Guide to Foreign Galleries" and a Russian sculptor
who lived on nuts and was "almost certainly" an anarchist.
It was this nucleus, and its outer ring of musical,
architectural and other American students, which posed
successively to Mrs. Farlow's versatile fancy as a centre of
"University Life", a "Salon of the Faubourg St. Germain", a
group of Parisian "Intellectuals" or a "Cross-section of
Montmartre"; but even her faculty for extracting from it the
most varied literary effects had not sufficed to create a
permanent demand for the "Inner Glimpses", and there were
days when--Mr. Farlow's landscapes being equally
unmarketable--a temporary withdrawal to the country