ings and injunctions were
ridiculous. What could he have done that he had not done? Run away with
Marguerite, carry her off? Silly! No, he was well out of the affair. He
perceived the limitations of the world in which Marguerite lived. It was
a world too small and too austere for him. He required the spaciousness
and the splendour of the new world in which Irene Wheeler and the
Ingrams lived. Yea, though it was a world that excited the sardonic in
him, he liked it. It flattered authentic, if unsuspected, appetites in
him. Still, the image of Marguerite inhabited his memory. He saw her as
she stood between himself and old Haim in the basement of No. 8. He
heard her.... She was absolutely unlike any other girl; she was so
gentle, so acquiescent. Only she put her lover second to her father....
What would Miss Wheeler think of the basement of No. 8?

The chatterers, apropos of songs in musical comedies, were talking about
a French popular song concerning Boulanger.

"You knew Boulanger, didn't you, Jules?" Miss Wheeler suggested.

M. Defourcambault looked round, content. He related in English how his
father had been in the very centre of the Boulangist movement, and had
predicted disaster to the General's cause from the instant that Madame
de Bonnemain came on the scene. (Out of consideration for the girls, M.
Defourcambault phrased his narrative with neat discretion.) His
grandfather also had been of his father's opinion, and his grandfather
was in the Senate, and had been Minister at Brussels.... He affirmed
that Madame de Bonnemain had telegraphed to Boulanger to leave Paris at
the very moment when his presence in Paris was essential, and Boulanger
had obediently gone. He said that he always remembered what his mother
had said to him: a clever woman irregularly in love with a man may make
his fortune, but a stupid woman is certain to ruin it. Finally he
related how he, Jules Defourcambault, had driven the General's carriage
on a famous occasion through Paris, and how the populace in its frenzy
of idolatry had even climbed on to the roof of the carriage.

"And what did you do, then?" George demanded in the hard tone of a
cross-examiner.

"I drove straight on," said M. Defourcambault, returning George's cold
stare.

This close glimpse into history--into politics and passion--excited
George considerably. He was furiously envious of M. Defourcambault, who
had been in the middle of things all his life, whose father, mot