caps and white aprons, sat yielding sustenance to as many bundles of white drapery. There were other white caps wandering in the broad paths, attended by little brown French children; the small straw-seated chairs were piled and stacked in some places and disseminated in others. An old lady in black, with white hair fastened over each of her temples by a large black comb, sat on the edge of a stone bench (too high for her delicate length) motionless, staring straight before her and holding a large door-key; under a tree a priest was reading—you could see his lips move at a distance; a young soldier, dwarfish and red-legged, strolled past with his hands in his pockets, which were very much distended. Waterville sat down with Mrs. Headway on the straw-bottomed chairs and she presently said: “I like this—it’s even better than the pictures in the gallery. It’s more of a picture.” “Everything in France is a picture—even things that are ugly,” Waterville replied. “Everything makes a subject.” “Well, I like France!” she summed up with a small incongruous sigh. Then suddenly, from an impulse more conceivably allied to such a sound, she added: “He asked me to go and see her, but I told him I wouldn’t. She may come and see me if she likes.” This was so abrupt that Waterville was slightly confounded; then he saw she had returned by a short cut to Sir Arthur Demesne and his honourable mother. Waterville liked to know about other people’s affairs, yet didn’t like this taste to be imputed to him; and therefore, though much desiring to see how the old lady, as he called her, would treat his companion, he was rather displeased with the latter for being so confidential. He had never assumed he was so intimate with her as that. Mrs. Headway, however, had a manner of taking intimacy for granted—a manner Sir Arthur’s mother at least wouldn’t be sure to like. He showed for a little no certainty of what she was talking about, but she scarcely explained. She only went on through untraceable transitions. “The least she can do is to come. I’ve been very kind to her son. That’s not a reason for my going to her—it’s a reason for her coming to me. Besides, if she doesn’t like what I’ve done she can leave me alone. I want to get into European society, but I want to do so in my own way. I don’t want to run after people; I want them to run after me. I guess they will, some day!” Waterville listened to this with his eyes on the ground; he felt himself turn very red. There was something in such crudities on the part of the ostensibly refined that shocked and mortified him, and Littlemore had been right in speaking of her lack of the _nuance_. She was terribly distinct; her motives, her impulses, her desires glared like the lighted signs of cafés-concerts. She needed to keep on view, to hand about, like a woman with things to sell on an hotel-terrace, her precious intellectual wares. Vehement thought, with Mrs.