and I was given three hundred francs, the price of my shame,
refusing an offer to repeat the performance during the following
week. To imagine such a thing made me a choking in my throat,
and I left the bureau in some sickness. This increased so much
(as I approached the Madeleine, where I wished to mount an
omnibus) that I entered a restaurant and drank a small glass of
cognac. Then I called for writing-papers and wrote to the good
Mother Superior and my dear little nieces at their convent. I
enclosed two hundred and fifty francs, which sum I had fallen
behind in my payments for their education and sustenance, and I
felt a moment's happiness that at least for a while I need not
fear that my poor brother's orphans might become objects of
charity--a fear which, accompanied by my own hunger, had led
me to become the joke of the boulevards.

Feeling rich with my remaining fifty francs, I ordered the
waiter to bring me a goulasch and a carafe of blond beer, after
the consummation of which I spent an hour in the reading of a
newspaper. Can it be credited that the journal of my perusement
was the one which may be called the North-American paper of the
aristocracies of Europe? Also, it contains some names of the
people of the United States at the hotels and elsewhere.

How eagerly I scanned those singular columns! Shall I confess to
what purpose? I read the long lists of uncontinental names over
and over, but I lingered not at all upon those like "Muriel,"
"Hermione," "Violet," and "Sibyl," nor over "Balthurst,"
"Skeffington-Sligo," and "Covering-Legge"; no, my search was for
the Sadies and Mamies, the Thompsons, Van Dusens, and Bradys. In
that lies my preposterous secret.