ssor Endicott fell back into severity. "I'm afraid," he observed,
returning to the papers on his desk, "I'm afraid that would not be a
very efficacious method of determining a question of historical
accuracy."

Harrison settled his soft hat firmly on his head. "I suppose you're
right," he remarked, adding as he disappeared through the door, "But
more's the pity!"

II

He made short work of settling himself in Paris, taking a cheap
furnished room near the Bibliotheque Nationale,[117-1] discovering at
once the inexpensive and nourishing qualities of _cremeries_ and
the Duval restaurants, and adapting himself to the eccentricities of
Paris weather in March with flannel underwear and rubber overshoes. He
attacked the big folios in the library with ferocious energy, being the
first to arrive in the huge, quiet reading-room, and leaving it only at
the imperative summons of the authorities. He had barely enough money
to last through March, April, and May, and, as he wrote in his long
Sunday afternoon letters to Maggie Warner, he would rather work fifteen
hours a day now while he was fresh at it, than be forced to, later on,
when decent weather began, and when he hoped to go about a little and
make some of the interesting historical pilgrimages in the environs of
Paris.

He made a point of this writing his fiancee every detail of his plans,
as well as all the small happenings of his monotonous and laborious
life; and so, quite naturally, he described to her the beginning of his
acquaintance with Agatha Midland.

"I'd spotted her for English," he wrote, "long before I happened to
see her name on a notebook. Don't it sound like a made-up name out
of an English novel? And that is the way she looks, too. I
understand now why no American girl is ever called Agatha. To fit
it you have to look sort of droopy all over, as if things weren't
going to suit you, but you couldn't do anything to help it, and did
not, from sad experience, have any rosy hopes that somebody would
come along to fix things right. I'm not surprised that when English
women do get stirred up over anything--for instance, like voting,
nowadays--they fight like tiger-cats. If this Agatha-person is a
fair specimen, they don't look as though they were used to getting
what they want any other way. But here I go, like every other fool
traveler, making generalizations about a whole nation from seeing
one speci