Auntie May got a great deal better, well enough to go into society--French society. Mrs. Jay sometimes went with her, but not always, and one night--a night that will long live in my memory--Auntie May went to Madame Taine's literary party all alone. At nine o'clock she came out of her room in her new evening cloak, and in a lovely pink dress all sequins and beads, and went down the stairs of the flat. I slipped out too, and went down on the train of her dress most of the way. She ought to have held it up, of course. She got into the cab the concierge had fetched, and having said goodbye to me upstairs, thought no more about me, and I was left sitting alone on the kerb. The gutter was dirty, full of vegetables and things thrown away, and even when they did tidy up, they only pushed the refuse under a grating. The dirty towel the men used to stop up the hole in the sewer with was lying near by--a stupid way of arranging it, I thought. The noise in the street was terrific. It was the first time I had stood there alone. The tinkly horse bells got on my nerves--horses all wear collars in Paris. One wonders they don't spoil their ruffs. Auntie May won't let any of her cats wear them, though for some reasons it would be most convenient, for one would always know where the cat was at a given moment. I longed to get in again, but the great big doors were shut. So sooner than sit still doing nothing, I moved a little way farther down the street, and gradually got on to what I imagined from descriptions must be the Big Boulevard. It was a great danger, but luckily it was dark. At the crossing there was a policeman with a stick that he tried to keep cabs back with as they do in London, so mother has told me, but the horses here just pushed it back rudely with their noses, and went on and nearly ran over people. I got across, and on the other side there were numbers of places where They eat, and many people sitting outside at little tables munching peanuts and drinking coffee out of glasses. They dropped pieces of sugar into them and gave them to their children, who all seemed to have leave to sit up and be out of doors in the night time. Rosamond and her sisters go to bed at eight, but then they are English children. Every moment I thought something was happening, people made such a noise. Every now and then men ran down the street calling out in dreadful fear; their harsh screams of terror frightened me, but I soon discovered, by an old gentleman near me giving one man a sou and quieting him, that these scraggy poor men were only selling their papers. In the middle of the road the stream of carriages and cabs rolled--rolled by till my poor head turned, and I didn't know when I should ever cross that river of carriages and get home. I knew, having crossed the street once, that I was bound to cross it again to get back, but there was not a cat in the whole region from whom I could ask the way.