Engin is not far from Paris, and the French country seemed to me like a fairy-book. Tall green poplars and green river banks, and a little lake reflecting the foliage and the stems of sapling oak and pine, just as in the pictures. The driver pointed with his whip, and I saw a high garden wall shadowed with young trees, and a tall loose iron gate. As I walked up the gravel path I looked for the beautiful mistress, who, dressed in muslin, with sleeves open at the elbow, should feed pigeons from a silver plate of Venus and the does. M. Sevres caught me looking at it; and hoping his mistress might appear I prolonged the conversation till a tardy sense of the value of his time forced me to bring it to a close; and as I passed down the green garden with him I scanned hopefully every nook, fancying I should see her reading, and that she would raise her eyes as I passed. Looking back through the years it seems to me that I did catch sight of a white dress behind a trellis. But that dress might have been his daughter's, even his wife's. I only know that I did not discover M. Sevres's mistress that day nor any other day. I never saw him again. Now the earth is over him, as Rossetti would say, and all the reveries that the photographs had inspired resulted in nothing, mere childish sensualities. I returned to Engin with my taciturn valet; but he showed no enthusiasm on the subject of Engin. I saw he was sighing after beef, beer and a wife, and was but little disposed to settle in this French suburb. We were both very much alone in Paris. In the evenings I allowed him to smoke his clay in my room, and in an astounding brogue he counselled me to return to my mother. But I would not listen, and one day on the Boulevards I was stricken with the art of Jules Lefebvre. True it is that I saw it was wanting in that tender grace which I am forced to admit even now, saturated though I now am with the æsthetics of different schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work; but at the time I am writing of my nature was too young and mobile to resist the conventional attractiveness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slender hips and hands, and I accepted Jules Lefebvre wholly and unconditionally. He hesitated, however, when I asked to be taken as a private pupil, but he wrote out the address of a studio where he gave instruction every Tuesday morning. This was even more to my taste, for I had an instinctive liking for Frenchmen, and was anxious to see as much of them as possible.