She had the gift of rapid definition, and his questions as to the life she had led with the Farlows, during the interregnum between the Hoke and Murrett eras, called up before him a queer little corner of Parisian existence. The Farlows themselves--he a painter, she a “magazine writer”--rose before him in all their incorruptible simplicity: an elderly New England couple, with vague yearnings for enfranchisement, who lived in Paris as if it were a Massachusetts suburb, and dwelt hopefully on the “higher side” of the Gallic nature. With equal vividness she set before him the component figures of the circle from which Mrs. Farlow drew the “Inner Glimpses of French Life” appearing over her name in a leading New England journal: the Roumanian lady who had sent them tickets for her tragedy, an elderly French gentleman who, on the strength of a week’s stay at Folkestone, translated English fiction for the provincial press, a lady from Wichita, Kansas, who advocated free love and the abolition of the corset, a clergyman’s widow from Torquay who had written an “English Ladies’ Guide to Foreign Galleries” and a Russian sculptor who lived on nuts and was “almost certainly” an anarchist. It was this nucleus, and its outer ring of musical, architectural and other American students, which posed successively to Mrs. Farlow’s versatile fancy as a centre of “University Life”, a “Salon of the Faubourg St. Germain”, a group of Parisian “Intellectuals” or a “Cross-section of Montmartre”; but even her faculty for extracting from it the most varied literary effects had not sufficed to create a permanent demand for the “Inner Glimpses”, and there were days when--Mr. Farlow’s landscapes being equally unmarketable--a temporary withdrawal to the country (subsequently utilized as “Peeps into Chateau Life”) became necessary to the courageous couple. Five years of Mrs. Murrett’s world, while increasing Sophy’s tenderness for the Farlows, had left her with few illusions as to their power of advancing her fortunes; and she did not conceal from Darrow that her theatrical projects were of the vaguest. They hung mainly on the problematical good-will of an ancient comedienne, with whom Mrs. Farlow had a slight acquaintance (extensively utilized in “Stars of the French Footlights” and “Behind the Scenes at the Francais”), and who had once, with signs of approval, heard Miss Viner recite the Nuit de Mai.