Dora, thanks to her invincible youth, had partly recovered. Last night was a thousand years ago for her; only the present existed. Eternity is now. She wore a morning-gown as pretty as herself. And she was pretty; in his eyes she kept growing prettier each time he looked at her. He said so. She rushed round the table to kiss him. A tempestuous temperament. The breakfast-room was also the living-room. It was in a tasteful key, the furnishing banal. The view gave on a sea of roofs and spires. The park, with its sunburnt foliage, even then a green that had decayed for want of proper soil, lay across the west prospect. Dora informed him that the apartment was in the tallest building on upper Lexington Avenue. He believed her. There was one balcony, and of stone. Together they stood upon it smoking their first cigarette. Both were in an expansive mood. Strong tea, buttered toast and marmalade unloosed their tongues. Before they left the room she had rung and another pretty girl entered. She was a quadroon, lovely of hair, complexion, and with a profile that would not have been out of place on an antique medal. Ulick, who Paris born and bred, had no "democratic" prejudices on the score of colour, admiringly stared at the girl as she noiselessly went about her task. Dora didn't like his look. "I see," she primly remarked, "you for the black-and-tan!" His inquiring expression, for he didn't understand, caused her to jerk her head in the direction of the maid. "I mean the slavey." "Oh!" he carelessly confessed, "I had a little chocolate-coloured mistress from Mauritius when I lived in Paris, and she wasn't half as pretty as this girl. Since Baudelaire set the fashion young French poets and artists have gone in for dusky concubines. I hear that at the time there was such a demand that the Isle de France was positively emptied of those young women. You know, Dora, Manet painted a marvellous negress in his Olympe, the slim, nude courtesan with the depraved eyes in the Luxembourg. It ought to be in the Louvre--perhaps it will be some day--"