Somewhat reluctantly, feeling a little forlorn and abandoned, Cynthia left the Brewsters in Britanny and returned to Paris. France is a great spider web of glittering rails of railways, but Paris, like a giant, not unfriendly, spider, sits in the heart, if not the exact center, and to go almost anywhere it is cheaper and easier to return to that city and start all over again. An hour on the train, and the feeling of forlornness began to disappear. Under Nancy’s stern tutelage Cynthia’s French had improved enormously. Now she knew how to order a meal, where and how to buy her lunch, if there was no dining car on the train; knew that she must give up her ticket at the exit barrier, but retain it until then, and half a hundred other small things that went to make life and travel smoother and more pleasant. Going back to Paris was almost like going home again. Her own little room up near the roof in the Hotel St. Severin, or one very like it except that the wallpaper sprawled magenta fuschias on a green ground instead of huge coins of blue and gold and purple on a red ground. A dinner with Alice and the Murchisons, and a pressing invitation to bring over her bags from the hotel and stay with them as long as she could. Then she encountered, of all people, Stasia Carruthers, in front of the Café de la Paix, and was carried off to Rumplemeier’s for one of their scrumptious teas. News was exchanged. Stasia had been down to Switzerland, was back now for some fittings and to buy some new hats. Gaily Cynthia plunged into her own adventures, even to how she had sold three portraits of children in the little town of Le Conquet, once she had succeeded in breaking down the reserve of the villagers. For just a little while she found herself envying Stasia; her new, smart little Paris hat, her trick little silk suit, fresh from the scissors of Chanel. Looking up suddenly she surprised a strange expression in Stasia’s dark eyes. Could it be envy? Envy for the greater adventure of earning your way. Anyone could buy his way on a fat letter of credit. But to earn as you went, that was the greater risk, hence the greater adventure. Cynthia chuckled to herself, tucked a stray curl beneath the brim of the hat she had bought for fifty francs in the Rue St. Roch, and ceased to envy Stasia. Two days later, having restocked her box of water colors on the Boulevard Montparnasse, that parnassus of all good little art students, she took train at some uncanny hour of the early morning for Bordeaux. There, late in the afternoon and from the shouting hotel runners at the station, each screaming the particular merits of his own hotel, she chose the Hotel de New York. It seemed homelike as to name at least.