“Heavens! how few people one meets whose portmanteau one would care to ransack!... And yet how few there are from whom one wouldn’t get some queer reaction if one knew the right word--the right gesture!... A fine lot of puppets; but, by Jove, one sees the strings too plainly. One meets no one in the streets nowadays but jackanapes and blockheads. Is it possible for a decent person--I ask you, Lafcadio--to take such a farce seriously? No, no! Be off with you! It’s high time! Off to a new world! Print your foot upon Europe’s soil and take a flying leap. If in the depths of Borneo’s forests there still remains a belated anthropopithex, go there and reckon the chances of a future race of mankind.... “I should have liked to see Protos again. No doubt he’s made tracks for America. He used to make out that the barbarians of Chicago were the only persons he esteemed.... Not voluptuous enough for my taste--a pack of wolves! I’m feline by nature.... Well, enough of that! “The _padre_ of Covigliajo with his cheery face didn’t look in the least inclined to deprave the little boy he was talking to. He was certainly in charge of him. I should have liked to make friends with him--not with the _curé_, my word!--but with the little boy. “How beautiful his eyes were when he raised them to mine! He was as anxious and as afraid to meet my look as I his--but I looked away at once. He was barely five years younger than I. Yes, between fourteen and sixteen--not more. What was I at that age? A _stripling_[H] full of covetousness, whom I should like to meet now; I think I should take a great fancy to myself.... Faby was quite abashed at first to feel that he had fallen in love with me; it was a good thing he made a clean breast of it to my mother; after that he felt lighterhearted. But how irritated I was by his self-restraint! Later on in the Aures, when I told him about it under the tent, we had a good laugh together.... I should like to see him again; it’s a pity he’s dead. Well, enough of that! “The truth is, I hoped the _curé_ would dislike me. I tried to think of disagreeable things to say to him--I could hit on nothing that wasn’t charming. It’s wonderful how hard I find it not to be fascinating. Yet I really can’t stain my face with walnut juice, as Carola recommended, or start eating garlic.... Ah! don’t let me think of that poor creature any more. It’s to her I owe the most mediocre of my pleasures.... Oh!! What kind of ark can that strange old man have come out of?” The sliding door into the corridor had just let in Amédée Fleurissoire. Fleurissoire had travelled in an empty compartment as far as Frosinone. At that station a middle-aged Italian had got into his carriage and had begun to stare at him with such glowering eyes that Fleurissoire had made haste to take himself off. In the next compartment, Lafcadio’s youthful grace, on the contrary, attracted him.