derate in thought, still agile at forty,
claiming even that this is man's best time--the period of fortune and
gallantry--sliding along in life and taking things as he found them,
wisely considering that a day's snow or rain lasts no longer than a
day's sunshine, and that, after all, a wretched night is soon over.

On leaving Vaudrey the previous night, Lissac had passed part of the
night at his club on Place Vendome. He had played and won. He had gone
to sleep over a fashionable novel, very faithfully written, but
wearisome in the extreme, and he had awakened late and somewhat
heavy-headed. There were fringes of snow upon the window-sills and upon
the house facing his little mansion. The roofs were hidden under a large
white sheet and half lost in the grayish-white background of the sky.

"Detestable weather! So much the better," thought Lissac, "I shall have
no visitors."

"I will see no one," he said to his servant. "In such weather no one but
borrowers will come."

He had just finished his dejeuner, plunging a Russian enamelled silver
spoon into his egg, his tea smoking at his side in a burnished silver
teapot with Japanese designs, when, notwithstanding his orders, the
servant handed him a card written in pencil on a scrap of paper torn
from a note-book.

"It is not a borrower, monsieur!"

Guy seized the paper disdainfully, thinking, in spite of the servant's
opinion, that he would find the name of a beggar who had not even had
his name printed on a piece of Bristol-board, and, adjusting his glass,
he deciphered the fine writing on the paper; then after involuntarily
exclaiming: _Ah! bah_! and _well! well!_ greatly astonished, he said as
he rose:

"Show her in!"

He had thrown on a chair his damask napkin of Muscovite pattern, and
instinctively glanced at himself in the mirror, just as a coquette might
do before a rendezvous, smoothing out his flannel vest and spreading out
his cravat that only half-fastened the blue foulard collar of his
dressing-gown.

At the moment that he was examining the folds made on his red leather
slippers by his ample flannel trousers, a woman half-raised the satin
portiere, and, standing within a frame formed by the folds of yellow
satin, looked at the young man, displaying her brilliant teeth as she
smilingly said:

"Good-morning, Guy!"

Lissac went straight toward her with outstretched hands.

She allowed the large satin portiere to fall behind her, and after
having pe