It was expensive, to be sure, for every
time you had to comb your hair a barber must be paid, and every time you
changed your linen one shirt must be bought and another thrown away; but
anything was better, argued these young gentlemen, than to be the slaves
of haversacks. "A fellow has to get rid gradually of all material
attachments: that was manhood," said they; "and as long as you were
bound down to anything--house, umbrella, or portmanteau--you were still
tethered by the umbilical cord." Something engaging in this theory
carried the most of us away. The two Frenchmen, indeed, retired
scoffing to their bock, and Romney, being too poor to join the excursion
on his own resources, and too proud to borrow, melted unobtrusively
away. Meanwhile the remainder of the company crowded the benches of a
cab; the horse was urged, as horses have to be, by an appeal to the
pocket of the driver; the train caught by the inside of a minute; and in
less than an hour and a half we were breathing deep of the sweet air of
the forest, and stretching our legs up the hill from Fontainebleau
octroi, bound for Barbizon. That the leading members of our party
covered the distance in fifty-one minutes and a half is, I believe, one
of the historic landmarks of the colony; but you will scarce be
surprised to learn that I was somewhat in the rear. Myner, a
comparatively philosophic Briton, kept me company in my deliberate
advance; the glory of the sun's going down, the fall of the long
shadows, the inimitable scent, and the inspiration of the woods, attuned
me more and more to walk in a silence which progressively infected my
companion; and I remember that, when at last he spoke, I was startled
from a deep abstraction.

"Your father seems to be a pretty good kind of a father," said he. "Why
don't he come to see you?" I was ready with some dozen of reasons, and
had more in stock; but Myner, with that shrewdness which made him feared
and admired, suddenly fixed me with his eyeglass and asked, "Ever press
him?"

The blood came in my face. No, I had never pressed him; I had never even
encouraged him to come. I was proud of him, proud of his handsome looks,
of his kind, gentle ways, of that bright face he could show when others
were happy; proud, too--meanly proud, if you like--of his great wealth
and startling liberalities. And yet he would have been in the way of my
Paris life, of much of which he would have disapproved. I had feared to
expose to c