"And you have no difficulties with the laundress?"

"None," he groaned. "But in the bright days of poverty that have fled
for ever, I have had many difficulties with her. This morning I
reconstituted the situation--I imagined myself without a sou, and
without a collar."

"The little restaurant," she questioned, "where I saw you dining on the
odour?"

"I figured fondly to myself that I was ravenous and that I dared not
enter. It was sublime."

"The mont-de-piete?"

"There imagination restored to me the vanished moments when I have
mounted with suspense, and my least deplorable suit of clothes." His
emotion was profound. "It is my youth to which I am bidding adieu!" he
cried. "It is more than that--it is my aspirations and my renown!"

"But you have said that you have no renown," she reminded him.

"So much the more painful," said the young man; "the hussy we could not
win is always the fairest--I part from renown even more despairingly
than from youth."

She felt an amusement, an interest. But soon it was the turn of him to
feel an interest--the interest that had consequences so important, so
'eart-breaking, so _fatales_! He had demanded of her, most