Slowly the horror of having had to use physical force against a woman left Cartaret. He started for a long walk and thought many things. He thought, as he trudged at last across L'Etoile, how the April starshine was turning the Arc de Triomphe to silver, and how the lovers on the benches at the junction of the rue Lauriston and the avenue Kléber made Napoleon's arch in praise of war a monument to softer passions. He thought, as he strolled from the avenue d'Eylan and across the Place Victor Hugo, how the heart of that poet, whose statue here represented him as so much the politician, must grow warm when, as now, boys and girls passed arm in arm about the pediment. The night bore jonquils in her hands and wore a spray of wisteria in her hair. Brocaded ghosts of the old régime must be pacing a stately measure at Ranelagh, and all the elves of Spring were dancing in the Bois. The Princess was poor. That brought her nearer to him: it gave him a chance to help her. Cartaret found it hard to be sorry that she was poor. CHAPTER IX BEING THE TRUE REPORT OF A CHAPERONED DÉJEUNER For she hath breathed celestial air, And heavenly food hath been her fare, And heavenly thought and feelings give her face That heavenly grace. --Southey: _The Curse of Kehama_. Sometimes a mattress is doubtless as efficient a means of pressing one's clothes as any other means, but doubtless always a good deal depends upon the mattress. By way of general rules, it may be laid down, for instance, that the mattress employed must not be too thin, must not be stuffed with a material so gregarious as to gather together in lumpy communities, and must not sag in the middle. Cartaret's mattress failed to meet these fundamental requirements, and when he made his careful toilet on the morning that he was to take _déjeuner_ at the Room Across the Landing, he became uneasily aware that his clothes betrayed certain evidences of what had happened to them. He had been up half a dozen times in the night to rearrange the garments, in fear of just such a misfortune; but his activities were badly repaid; the front of the suit bore a series of peculiar wrinkles, rather like the complicated hatchments on an ancient family's escutcheon; he could not see how, when the coat was on him, its back looked, and he was afraid to speculate. With his mirror now hung high and now standing on the floor, he practiced before it until he happily discovered that the wrinkles could be given a more or less reasonable excuse if he could only remember to adopt and assume a mildly Pre-Raphaelite bearing.