es, whom he saw
sometimes at Madame Roger's, and who each wore Sunday evenings roses in
her hair, which made them resemble those pantheons in sponge-cake that
pastry-cooks put in their windows on fete days.

If Amedee had been presented to twelve thousand maidens successively,
they would have inspired twelve thousand wishes. There was the servant of
the family on the first floor, whose side-glance troubled him as he met
her on the staircase; and his heart sank every time he turned the handle
of the door of a shop in the Rue Bonaparte, where an insidious clerk
always forced him to choose ox-colored kid gloves, which he detested. It
must not be forgotten that Amedee was very young, and was in love with
love.

He was so extremely timid that he never had had the audacity to tell the
girl at the glove counter that he preferred bronze-green gloves, nor the
boldness to show Maria Gerard his poems composed in her honor, in which
he now always put the plural "amours," so as to make it rhyme with
"toujours," which was an improvement. He never had dared to reply to the
glance of the little maid on the second floor; and he was very wrong to
be embarrassed, for one morning, as he passed the butcher's shop, he saw
the butcher's foreman put his arm about the girl's waist and whisper a
love speech over a fine sirloin roast.

Sometimes, in going or coming from the office, Amedee would go to see his
friend Maurice, who had obtained from Madame Roger permission to install
himself in the Latin Quarter so as to be near the law school.

In a very low-studded first-floor room in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince,
Amedee perceived through a cloud of tobacco-smoke the elegant Maurice in
a scarlet jacket lying upon a large divan. Everything was rich and
voluptuous, heavy carpets, handsomely bound volumes of poems, an open
piano, and an odor of perfumery mingled with that of cigarettes. Upon the
velvet-covered mantel Mademoiselle Irma, the favorite of the master of
the apartment, had left the last fashionable novel, marking, with one of
her hairpins, where she had left off reading. Amedee spent a delightful
hour there. Maurice always greeted him with his joyful, kind manner, in
which one hardly minded the slight shade of patronage. He walked up and
down his room, expanding his finely moulded chest, lighting and throwing
away his cigarettes, seating himself for two minutes at the piano and
playing one of Chopin's sad strains, opening a book and readin