Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no longer a mere student. He had published a good many songs; articles had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you would meet the men who had “arrived”--actors, painters, musicians, authors, and now and then a politician--who thus recognised him as more or less one of themselves. Everybody liked him; everybody said, “He is splendidly gifted; he will go far.” A few of us already addressed him, half-playfully perhaps, as _cher maître_. He was three or four years older than I--eight or nine and twenty to my twenty-five--and I was still in the schools; but for all that we were great chums. Quite apart from his special talent, he was a remarkable man--amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate. He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-nobbed with all sorts and conditions of people. He had wit, imagination, humour, and a voice that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear. For myself I admired him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of my hero-worship and the lion’s share of my friendship; perhaps I was vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy. We used to spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine, or over the table of a café, talking till the small hours--Elysian sessions, at which we smoked more cigarettes and emptied more _bocks_ than I should care to count. On Sundays and holidays we would take long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by Godelinette, go to Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck our hats with wildflowers, and romp like children. He was tall and slender, with dark waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin, and grey eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy the Boulevard St. Michel, flooded with sunshine, broken here and there by long crisp shadows; trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns; students and _étudiantes_ sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on the _trottoir_; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one of the multitude on the terrace of a café; and Edmund and Godelinette coming to join me--he with his swinging stride, a gesture of salutation, a laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured spring toilets: I fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden age. Then we would drink our _apéritifs_, our Turin bitter, perhaps our absinthe, and go off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue’s.