set in the flowery field of society, was quite capable of lifting a foot
now and then to put it within the borders of another and a different
area. Truesdale first met him in a sculptor's studio, at the top of one
of the great down-town office buildings; the young Briton was escorting a
pair of young women of his own circle who seemed disposed to encourage
art to the extent of seeing how the thing was done, and whose interest
was largely exhausted with an understanding of certain mechanical
processes. He and Truesdale subsequently grazed against each other at
places where young women, again, were present, whose interest in matters
aesthetic was in varying proportions, and whose social foothold was in
the lower strata--or substrata, as the case might be. Paston handled life
with the easy freedom of a man who, after all, was away from home; and
Truesdale was not far behind. Home, with him, was everywhere--or, rather,
nowhere; he had a great capacity for gypsy-like jauntings and an immense
abhorrence of superfluous luggage, and among the most superfluous of all
luggage he included scruples first and foremost. As soon expect a swallow
to carry a portmanteau.

During his first year abroad he had dabbled a good deal in French
fiction; this was at Geneva, before his long and intimate sojourn in
Paris. His taste had been formed, in the first instance, by the more
frivolous productions of the Romantic school--by "Mademoiselle de
Maupin," in part; by the "Vie de Boheme," more largely; and this taste
had taken a confirmed set through the perusal of other works of a like
trend--more contemporaneous and therefore still more deleterious. At
Geneva he had permitted himself various fond imaginings of Mimi and
Musette as they might disclose themselves in Paris--it was useless, all,
to expect the encounter in this strenuous little stronghold of Calvinism;
but Mimi and Musette, the actual, the contemporaneous, once met at short
range, were far, far from the _gracieuse_ and _mignonne_ creations of