She told him about her French grandmother who had jilted a title to follow an adventurous lover to Baltimore; how she herself lived in a copy of a French château surrounded by a vast western garden; about her father who sat all day in his tapestried library, reading Balzac. She told him about her majestic mother who sceptred it over everybody and dispensed formidable charity to a grateful countryside. But she did not dare refer to the one thing that would have impressed Eugene Walter more than all her guilty exaggerations. She did not dare refer to her grandmother’s momentous interview with the famous chatelaine of Nohant; for to have brought Madame Sand into it would have in some subtle fashion given her own secret away. Therefore, there was nothing for it but to gild everything else. At midnight Eugene Walter stooped and gallantly kissed her hand. “Good-night, Egeria,” he whispered, and his eyes were two promises lighting her up the darkened stairs. Matilda tottered happily to her room. She had been flattered for over two hours in words five syllables long, and her adroit fictions had enabled her to measure up to the flame of her gown. And he had called her Egeria. That sounded involved and classical. Just who was this divinity? Some goddess, perhaps, who had turned Mount Olympus upside down by appearing on it attired in a crimson tunic. Matilda hung her own bright gown caressingly away in the closet and tumbled into bed too stirred for sleep. This was it. This was the beginning. George Sand herself had probably hung around Paris a week or two before Sandeau noticed her. And hadn’t Eugene promised to introduce her to his crowd and dedicate his novel to _Mathilde_ Gessler? And out there among those powerful literary friends of his perhaps there was a poet whose hands were not moist and who looked like Byron. * * * * * Matilda Gessler and Eugene Walter stole out every night after dinner. She descended Flora Campbell’s stairs in scarlet silk with the long dark cape wrapped romantically about her. They wandered along the shore of the Lake, and while the spray misted the sidewalk with pearl, he concealed the thinness of his soul under trappings borrowed from Oscar Wilde. Occasionally he stepped back and allowed Swinburne to make love to Matilda. And Matilda was satisfied. Once when a scimitar-shaped moon cut the wet purple clouds with silver, Eugene wound his long arms about Matilda and kissed her on the mouth. His lips were thin and cold and savoured in some ridiculous fashion of bitter tea. She very nearly cried out against she knew not what, but ten minutes later the old complacency came surging back when he murmured in her ear, “_Ma Mathilde ... Ma belle ... Ma princesse adorée._” French! How many generations of dark heads in France had dropped to catch the flattering music of those very words! Just so De Musset must have apostrophized George Sand....