in the shops, the
types of character and manner of occupation shown in the passing faces,
the street signs, the names of the hotels they passed, the motley
brightness of the flower-carts, the identity of the churches and public
buildings that caught her eye. But what she liked best, he divined, was
the mere fact of being free to walk abroad in the bright air, her
tongue rattling on as it pleased, while her feet kept time to the mighty
orchestration of the city's sounds. Her delight in the fresh air, in
the freedom, light and sparkle of the morning, gave him a sudden insight
into her stifled past; nor was it indifferent to him to perceive
how much his presence evidently added to her enjoyment. If only as a
sympathetic ear, he guessed what he must be worth to her. The girl
had been dying for some one to talk to, some one before whom she could
unfold and shake out to the light her poor little shut-away emotions.
Years of repression were revealed in her sudden burst of confidence; and
the pity she inspired made Darrow long to fill her few free hours to the
brim.

She had the gift of rapid definition, and his questions as to the life
she had led with the Farlows, during the interregnum between the Hoke
and Murrett eras, called up before him a queer little corner of Parisian
existence. The Farlows themselves--he a painter, she a "magazine
writer"--rose before him in all their incorruptible simplicity: an
elderly New England couple, with vague yearnings for enfranchisement,
who lived in Paris as if it were a Massachusetts suburb, and dwelt
hopefully on the "higher side" of the Gallic nature. With equal
vividness she set before him the component figures of the circle from
which Mrs. Farlow drew the "Inner Glimpses of French Life" appearing
over her name in a leading New England journal: the Roumanian lady who
had sent them tickets for her tragedy, an elderly French gentleman
who, on the strength of a week's stay at Folkestone, translated English
fiction for the provincial press, a lady from Wichita, Kansas, who
advocated free love and the abolition of the corset, a clergyman's
widow from Torquay who had written an "English Ladies' Guide to Foreign
Galleries" and a Russian sculptor who lived on nuts and was "almost
certainly" an anarchist. It was this nucleus, and its outer ring
of musical, architectural and other American students, which posed
successively to Mrs. Farlow's versatile fancy as a centre of "University
Life", a "S