But if life was hard and life was meager, and if down at the bottom of my heart it was continuously in question to which class of the poor I would finally belong, life to my surprise was taking on a varied pattern very different from the drab existence of hard work and self-denial that I had planned and was prepared to endure to the end. It began at the Rue du Sommerard, where at the outset we stumbled on what turned out to be the most colorful, unusual, and frequently perplexing association that had ever come the way of any one of us. When we took our rooms from Madame Bonnet she had told us that one room in the apartment was reserved for an Egyptian Prince who came only for the week ends. He was _bien comme il faut_, _très riche_, _très_ everything desirable. He would not disturb us, we might never see him. Upon inquiry we discovered that all Madame Bonnet’s rooms save those we were taking were occupied by Egyptian students of law or medicine or diplomacy. The Prince, himself, a cousin of the Khedive, was in the military school at Saint-Cyr. He kept a room at Madame Bonnet’s to spend an occasional holiday or Sunday with his compatriots, all of his age and all of the upper classes. We all shared the American flutter over titles, and when we caught a first glimpse of the Prince and his friends we were still more excited. They were quite the most elegant-looking male specimens so far as manners and clothes went that any one of us had ever seen. Here was more in the way of flavor than we had bargained for. We had come to study the French and had dropped into an Egyptian colony. We soon discovered that they were as curious about us as we were about them, for hardly were we settled when Madame Bonnet came to say that the _messieurs_ were all in her salon. Wouldn’t we come in and make their acquaintance? Of course we went. They wanted us to dance. Now it was Sunday, and we had all been brought up under the Methodist discipline. Sunday was a day of rest and worship and no play, no amusement of any kind. In my household at least I was supposed to play only hymns on the piano as we were supposed to read only religious books. My mother and I compromised at last on Gottschalk’s “Last Hope”; she, being moved by the story of its composition, thought that it must be religious, but “Martha” and “Poet and Peasant,” my two other show pieces, were forbidden. Indeed, when I was forty years old my father, catching me reading a volume of a certain Congressional trust investigation on a Sunday afternoon, reproved me in his gentle way. “You shouldn’t read that on Sunday, Ida.” I quickly exchanged it for “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which is not without suggestion for a student of the trust.