knowing Paris, of a wondrous
bland April night; that was hanging over it from vague consecrated
lamp-studded heights and taking in, spread below and afar, the great
scroll of all its irresistible story, pricked out, across river and
bridge and radiant _place_, and along quays and boulevards and avenues,
and around monumental circles and squares, in syllables of fire, and
sketched and summarised, further and further, in the dim fire-dust of
endless avenues; that was all of the essence of fond and thrilled and
throbbing recognition, with a thousand things understood and a flood of
response conveyed, a whole familiar possessive feeling appealed to and
attested.

"From you, you know, it _would_ be such a pleasure, and I think--in fact
I'm sure--it would do so much for the thing in America." Had she gone
on as they went, or had there been pauses of easy and of charmed and
of natural silence, breaks and drops from talk, but only into greater
confidence and sweetness?--such as her very gesture now seemed a part
of; her laying her gloved hand, for emphasis, on the back of his own,
which rested on his knee and which took in from the act he scarce knew
what melting assurance. The emphasis, it was true--this came to him even
while for a minute he held his breath--seemed rather that of Amy Evans;
and if her talk, while they rolled, had been in the sense of these words
(he had really but felt that they were shut intimately in together, all
his consciousness, all his discrimination of meanings and indications
being so deeply and so exquisitely merged in that) the case wasn't as
surely and sublimely, as extravagantly, as fabulously romantic for him
as his excited pulses had been seeming to certify. Her hand was there on
his own, in precious living proof, and splendid Paris hung over them,
as a consecrating canopy, her purple night embroidered with gold; yet he
waited, something stranger still having glimmered for him, waited though
she left her hand, which expressed emphasis and homage and tenderness,
and anything else she liked indeed--since it was all then a matter of
what he next heard and what he slowly grew cold as he took from her.

"You know they do it here so charmingly--it's a compliment a clever man
is always so glad to pay a literary friend, and sometimes, in the case
of a great name like yours, it renders such a service to a poor little
book like mine!" She spoke ever so humbly and yet ever so gaily--and
still more than