"Isn't this the most beautiful garden in the world?" murmured Mrs. Falconer. "Isn't it _too_ beautiful!" "Very," he incorrectly and vaguely answered. And the lady went on to say how brilliant she found the place with the suggestions and memories of the past royal times, whilst Bulstrode said nothing at all, because he did not want to tell her that Versailles and the charming alleys, and France, and the great big world, from limit to limit, was full of no ghosts to him, but of just one woman. THE THIRD ADVENTURE III IN WHICH HE FINDS THERE ARE SOME THINGS WHICH ONE CANNOT BUY After not a great deal of hesitation, toward the middle of a warm June, Bulstrode permitted himself to become the proprietor of a palace: not an inhabitant of the ordinary dwelling modelled after some old-world wonder, wherein American millionaires choose to spend their leisure in their own country--but of a real traditional palace, in whose charming rooms no object was younger than Bulstrode's great-grandfather, and where the enchanting women of the Fragonards and Nattiers almost made him, as he mused upon them, lose sight for a moment of a living lady. On the very first day he went over the Hôtel Montensier from _grenier_ to _caves_, Jimmy Bulstrode gave in, and accepted the Duc de Montensier's proposition to "fetch his traps for a few months to the hôtel and turn Parisian." He was in the heart of Paris, yet all around him, shut in by high walls, was a garden, to which the terraces of the house gave in flights of marble steps. When his friend suggested that Bulstrode turn Parisian, Jimmy laughed. "Do you think," he had asked, "that a chap born in Providence, educated in Harvard, and, if cosmopolitan, thoroughly American from start to finish, could, _mon cher_, turn Parisian?" And the Duc had assured him that he did not think Bulstrode had a "Latin eyelash," and that he needn't be at all afraid to try his luck at what a French house would do for him! "Why, your coat alone--the cut of it--" Montensier had laughed, "speaks of Poole with a Boston compromise! The Duc had been in the United States--moreover, the Frenchman had plans of his own and he wanted very much to go to Newport and leave his house in the care of Jimmy Bulstrode. Whether the Puritan in him led Bulstrode to excuse to himself his enjoyment of so much luxury, at any rate he apologized, saying that nobody could expect a man with a love of the beautiful, and who had more or less a desire to shut himself up and to shut himself away for a time, to refuse.