erhaps the most vital thing; and she could have imagined no greater
personal calamity now than to have seen him inconsistent. For there
are such men, and most people have known them. They are the men who,
unconsciously, keep life sweet.

Yet she was sorry he had invaded her hiding-place. She had not yet
achieved peace, and much of the weary task would have to be done over
after he was gone.

In the meantime she drifted with astounding ease into another existence.
For it was she, and not the confidential gentlemen, who showed Peter
Paris: not the careless, pleasure-loving Paris of the restaurants, but
of the Cluny and the Carnavalet. The Louvre even was not neglected, and
as they entered it first she recalled with still unaccustomed laughter
his reply to the proffered services of the guide. Indeed, there was much
laughter in their excursions: his native humour sprang from the same
well that held his seriousness. She was amazed at his ability to strip
a sham and leave it grotesquely naked; shams the risible aspect of which
she had never observed in spite of the familiarity four years had
given her. Some of his own countrymen and countrywomen afforded him
the greatest amusement in their efforts to carry off acquired European
"personalities," combinations of assumed indifference and effrontery,
and an accent the like of which was never heard before. But he was
neither bitter nor crude in his criticisms. He made her laugh, but he
never made her ashamed. His chief faculty seemed to be to give her the
power to behold, with astonishing clearness, objects and truths which
had lain before her eyes, and yet hidden. And she had not thought to
acquire any more truths.

The depth of his pleasure in the things he saw was likewise a
revelation to her. She was by no means a bad guide to the Louvre and the
Luxembourg, but the light in her which had come slowly flooded him with
radiance at the sight of a statue or a picture. He would stop with an
exclamation and stand gazing, self-forgetful, for incredible periods,
and she would watch him, filled with a curious sense of the limitations
of an appreciation she had thought complete. Where during his busy life
had he got this thing which others had sought in many voyages in vain?

Other excursions they made, and sometimes these absorbed a day. It was a
wonderful month, that Parisian September, which Honora, when she allowed
herself to think, felt that she had no right to. A month filled to