o go to Newport and leave his
house in the care of Jimmy Bulstrode. Whether the Puritan in him led
Bulstrode to excuse to himself his enjoyment of so much luxury, at any
rate he apologized, saying that nobody could expect a man with a love
of the beautiful, and who had more or less a desire to shut himself up
and to shut himself away for a time, to refuse.

The Falconers were off somewhere _en auto_. He had thought they had
gone through Spain. It was pretty hot to do such a thing, however, and
he did not really know. He wanted very much to be able not to let
himself follow them, and he knew that there was little chance of his
reaching such stoicism unless he began by not finding out where they
were going! So he shut himself up with the books which the library
offered and gave many charming little dinners and parties on his
terraces in the bland summer nights, and tried with all his might and
main to forget the flight of a certain motor over the fair white roads
and, above all, to nerve himself up to refuse an invitation for the
middle of July.

Directly opposite the white facade of the Montensiers' hotel was a
hostelry for beggars, for domestics without places; for poor
professors; for actors with no stages but the last; for laborers with
no labor; in short, for the riff-raff of the population, for those who
no longer hold the dignity of profession or pay rent for a term.
Sometimes Bulstrode would look out at the tenement, whose windows in
this season were wide open; and the general aspect indicated that
dislocated fortunes flourished. In one window, pirouetting or dancing
in it, calling out of it, leaning perilously over the sill of it, was a
child--as far as Bulstrode could decide, a creature of about six years
of age. She was too small to see much of, but all he saw was activity,
gesticulation, and perpetual motion. When the day was hot she fanned
herself with a bit of paper. She called far out to the wine-merchant's
wife, who sat with her family before the shop while her pretty children
played in the gutter.

In Paris, when the weather climbs to eighty, Parisians count themselves
in the tropics and the people, who lived apparently out of doors
altogether, wore a melted, disheartened air. But the De Montensier
garden, full of roses and heliotrope, watered and refreshed by the
fountains' delightful falling, was a retreat not to be surpassed by
many suburbs. Bulstrode gave little dinners on the terrace;