She sighed, relaxed back against the cushions and closed her eyes for a moment. Oh, the taxi was stopping. Her eyes popped open. Just a little policeman in a toy soldier cape and a white stick with which he seemed, miraculously, to hold up this mad traffic. Off again. She shut her eyes once more. New smells, hot asphalt, violets, damp warm air, something cooking, other things. She just couldn’t keep her eyes shut. The car was running along gray cobbles between gray houses high and incredibly ancient. Tall, plane trees leaned out over gray walls that held in a silvery stream. The Seine! A little gay colored steamer, like a miniature ferry-boat, hooted and put off from a landing. Cynthia wanted to hug it all at once, to pinch herself to be sure she was here. How she wished Judy could see it, and Chick, dear Chick. This was to have been their honeymoon. He’d be over shortly, a few weeks at the most. And meanwhile there was work to be done; a language to learn, Nancy and Mrs. Brewster to see, and covers to be done for _Little One’s Magazine_. Was that, could that possibly be, Notre Dame over there to the left? And the Eiffel Tower clear ahead, misty against sunny sky? She had seen it as they came in on the train. Really Paris! “Not a motion picture!” chuckled Cynthia. And tomorrow she could go and see it all for herself. Then a second bridge, Place St. Michel. And a swift turn to the left into a narrow street where noises echoed back from the high stone houses to right and left. They drew up before a door and a boy, in a horizontal striped waistcoat and white shirt sleeves, came out from the hotel entrance. Here was her home in Paris. Inside, at the little brass-railed desk, they had a key for her room and a letter from Mrs. Brewster, who had made her reservation for her. There was a little cage-like elevator into which one squeezed, barely avoiding the folding doors, and then up, up, like a wobbly balloon. A hallway musty and dark, and at last a tall room with two high French windows opening on to a small balcony. “Yes, this will do nicely,” said Cynthia in her best French, and so moved into Paris. When the door closed, Cynthia sat down to catch her breath. So much had happened in the last half hour, she had seen so much that was new, and strange, and lovely. “I suppose there are people that live in Paris all the time and take it as a matter of course,” she told herself. “And, I suppose, I shall get to take it that way too, after a bit. But now it’s all rather frightening. I wonder if I can make myself understood, I wonder if I shall get lost, I wonder ... oh goodness, how shall I order meals? But perhaps menu French is the same everywhere.”