hat night Jean Servien spent his days in translating
_Myrrha_ bit by bit, with an infinity of pains. The task having
taught him something of verse-making, he composed an ode, which
he sent by post to his mistress. The poem was writ in tears of
blood, yet it was as cold and insipid as a schoolboy's exercise.
Still, he did get something said of the fair vision of a woman
that hovered for ever before his eyes, and of the door he had
kissed in a night of frenzy.

Monsieur Servien was disturbed to note how his son had grown
heedless, absent-minded, and hollow-eyed, coming back late at
night, and hardly up before noon. Before the mute reproach in
his father's eyes the boy hung his head. But his home-life was
nothing now; his whole thoughts were abroad, hovering around
the unknown, in regions he pictured as resplendent with poetry,
wealth and pleasure.

Occasionally, at a street corner, he would meet the Marquis Tudesco
again. He had found it impossible to replace his waistcoat of
ticking. Moreover, he now advised Jean to pay his addresses to
shop-girls.

When the summer came, the theatrical posters announced in quick
succession _Mithridate, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Rodogune, les
Enfants d'Edouard, la Fiammina_. Jean, having secured the money
to pay for a seat by hook or by crook, by some bit of trickery or
falsehood, by cajoling his aunt or by a surreptitious raid on
the cash-box, would watch from an orchestra stall the startling
metamorphoses of the woman he loved. He saw her now girt with
the white fillet of the virgins of Hellas, like those figures
carved with such an exquisite purity in the marble of the Greek
bas-reliefs that they seem clad in inviolate innocence, now in a
flowered gown, with powdered ringlets sweeping her naked shoulders,
that had an inexpressible charm in their spare outlines suggestive
of the bitter-sweet taste of an unripe fruit. She reminded him
in this attire of some old-time pastel of gallant ladies such
as the bookbinder's son had pored over in the dealers' shops
on the _Quai Voltaire_. Anon she would be crowned with a
hawk's crest, girdled with plaques of gold on which were traced
magic symbols in clustered rubies, clad in the barbaric splendour
of an Eastern queen; presently she would be wearing the black
hood, pointed above the brow, and the dusky velvet robe of a
Royal widow, like the portraits to be seen guarded as holy relics
in a chamber of the Louvre; last travesty of all (and it was in