As Beechman was busy with a novel I had everything my own way without strategy during those following days. There are a thousand attractive places to go in and near Paris, and I was resourceful in contriving excursions for the days when there was no chance of seeing only her. Almost every day the London papers or the Paris _Herald_ printed something about Edna and the brilliant season she was having in London; often not far away from her name in a list of guests was the name of Prince Frascatoni. My own activities, more Bohemian as was my taste and the taste of my friends--and I may say the taste of civilized and intelligent Paris--my activities were not recorded in the papers. I fancied they were unobserved. I was soon to be undeceived. I wonder who the people are that write anonymous letters--and give anonymous “tips” to society journals? Every once in a while by mischance--often by my having made a remark that was misinterpreted into something malicious or low, utterly foreign to my real meaning--I have had some fellow-being suddenly unveil a noisome corner in his or her soul for confidently awaited sympathy; and I have almost literally shrunk back in my horror at the cesspool of coarseness, or at the vicious envy. Have you had that experience? No doubt scattered among us ordinary folk, neither particularly good nor particularly bad, well rather than ill-disposed and amiable, if not too severely tried or tempted--no doubt, scattered among us there are not a few of these swine souls or snake souls, hid beneath a pleasant smile and fine raiment. And these are they who give off the foulness of the anonymous letters and the anonymous tip. In one of the minor London society papers appeared this paragraph which I am sure I quote word for word: “American Paris is much amused these beautifully fine spring days with the ardent love-making of a recently divorced railway ‘baron.’ The lady is herself a divorcee of several years standing and is supposed to be engaged to a famous young literary man who is all unaware of what is going on.” I know of five copies of this journal that were mailed with the paragraph marked. The five were received by Edna, Margot, myself, Mary Kirkwood, and Hartley Beechman. I have often mentally gone through the list of my acquaintances in search of the person who was responsible for this thing. I have some extremely unpleasant characters in that list. But I have never been able to suspect who did it. Not improbably the guilty person is some one in other respects not a bad sort--for almost any given cut from that vast universal, human nature, contains something of everything.