ere he found Ella.

"General," she began.

"Miss Flowers," said the strong man simply, "Call me Ulysses."

And there let us leave them.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CUSTER'S LAST STAND

In the Manner of Edith Wharton

It was already late afternoon and the gas street lamps of the Boul'
Mich' were being lighted for Paris, or at least for Paris in summer, by
a somewhat frigid looking allumeur, when Philip Custer came to the
end of his letter. He hesitated for an instant, wrote "Your----," then
crossed that out and substituted "Sincerely." No, decidedly the first
ending, with its, as is, or, rather, as ordinarily is, the case in
hymeneal epistles, somewhat possessive sense, would no longer suffice.
"Yours truly"--perhaps; "sincerely"--better; but certainly not "Your
husband." He was done, thank God, with presences.

Philip sipped his absinthe and gazed for an instant through the Cafe
window; a solitary fiacre rattled by; he picked up the result of his
afternoon's labor, wearily.

"Dear Mary," he read, "When I told you that my employers were sending
me to Paris, I lied to you. It was, perhaps, the first direct lie that I
ever told you; it was, I know now, the last. But a falsehood by word of
mouth mattered really very little in comparison with the enormous lie
that my life with you had become."

Philip paused and smiled, somewhat bitterly, at that point in the
letter. Mary, with her American woman's intuition, would undoubtedly
surmise that he had run off with Mrs. Everett; there was a certain
ironical humor in the fact that Mary's mistaken guess would be sadly
indicative of her whole failure to understand what her husband was, to
use a slang expression, "driving at."

"I hope that you will believe me when I say that I came to Paris to
paint. In the past four years the desire to do that has grown steadily
until it has mastered me. You do not understand. I found no one in
America who did. I think my mother might have, had she lived; certainly
it is utterly incomprehensible to father."

Philip stopped. Ay, there was the rub--General Custer, and all that he
stood for. Philip glimpsed momentarily those early boyhood days with his
father, spent mainly in army posts; the boy's cavalry uniform, in which
he had ridden old Bess about the camp, waving his miniature sabre; the
day he had been thrown to the ground by a strange horse which he had
disobediently mounted, just as his father arrived on the scene.
Philip had never forg