hich was her chief
characteristic. She would go to the neighboring groceries, rotisseries,
patisseries, green vegetable stands, and get the few things she needed
in the smallest quantities, always selecting the best and preparing them
with the greatest care. She was an excellent cook and loved to set a
dainty and shining table. She saw no need of company, for she was
perfectly happy alone with Eugene and felt that he must be with her. She
had no desire to go anywhere by herself--only with him; and she would
hang on every thought and motion waiting for him to say what his
pleasure would be.

The wonder of Paris to Eugene was its freshness and the richness of its
art spirit as expressed on every hand. He was never weary of looking at
the undersized French soldiery with their wide red trousers, blue coats
and red caps, or the police with their capes and swords and the cab
drivers with their air of leisurely superiority. The Seine, brisk with
boats at this season of the year, the garden of the Tuileries, with its
white marble nudes and formal paths and stone benches, the Bois, the
Champ de Mars, the Trocadero Museum, the Louvre--all the wonder streets
and museums held him as in a dream.

"Gee," he exclaimed to Angela one afternoon as he followed the banks of
the Seine toward Issy, "this is certainly the home of the blessed for
all good artists. Smell that perfume. (It was from a perfume factory in
the distance.) See that barge!" He leaned on the river wall. "Ah," he
sighed, "this is perfect."

They went back in the dusk on the roof of an open car. "When I die," he
sighed, "I hope I come to Paris. It is all the heaven I want."

Yet like all perfect delights, it lost some of its savour after a time,
though not much. Eugene felt that he could live in Paris if his art
would permit him--though he must go back, he knew, for the present
anyhow.

Angela, he noticed after a time, was growing in confidence, if not in
mentality. From a certain dazed uncertainty which had characterized her
the preceding fall when she had first come to New York, heightened and
increased for the time being by the rush of art life and strange
personalities she had encountered there and here she was blossoming into
a kind of assurance born of experience. Finding that Eugene's ideas,
feelings and interests were of the upper world of thought
entirely--concerned with types, crowds, the aspect of buildings,
streets, skylines, the humors and pathetic aspe