y twenty years, but I recognized in that
soft and melancholy Jewish face, with the soft moustache and the soft
beard, the wistful features of the boy of fifteen who had been my
companion at an "international" school (a clever invention for
inflicting exile upon patriots) with branches at Hastings, Dresden and
Versailles.

Soon I was telling him, not without satisfaction, that, being a dramatic
critic, and attached to a London daily paper which had decided to
flatter its readers by giving special criticisms of the more important
new French plays, I had come to Paris for the production of _Notre Dame
de la Lune_ at the Vaudeville.

And as I told him the idea occurred to me for positively the first time:

"By the way, I suppose you aren't any relation of Octave Boissy?"

I rather hoped he was; for after all, say what you like, there is a
certain pleasure in feeling that you have been to school with even a
relative of so tremendous a European celebrity as Octave Boissy--the man
who made a million and a half francs with his second play, which was
nevertheless quite a good play. All the walls of Paris were shouting his
name.

"I'm the johnny himself," he replied with timidity, naively proud of his
Saxon slang.

I did not give an astounded _No_! An astounded _No_! would have been
rude. Still, my fear is that I failed to conceal entirely my amazement.
I had to fight desperately against the natural human tendency to assume
that no boy with whom one has been to school can have developed into a
great man.

"Really!" I remarked, as calmly as I could, and added a shocking lie:
"Well, I'm not surprised!" And at the same time I could hear myself
saying a few days later at the office of my paper: "I met Octave Boissy
in Paris. Went to school with him, you know."

"You'd forgotten my Christian name, probably," he said.

"No, I hadn't," I answered. "Your Christian name was Minor. You never
had any other!" He smiled kindly. "But what on earth are you doing
here?"

Octave Boissy was a very wealthy man. He even looked a very wealthy man.
He was one of the darlings of success and of an absurdly luxurious
civilization. And he seemed singularly out of place in the vast, banal
foyer of the Hotel Terminus, among the shifting, bustling crowd of
utterly ordinary, bourgeois, moderately well-off tourists and travellers
and needy touts. He ought at least to have been in a very select private
room at the Meurice or the Bristol, if in any