the heads of the bald gentleman in the third row and the wide-eyed little St. Cyrien across the aisle. The which Gabrielle found to be the trade of a camel. Each had her horses, and her carriage, in which she was whirled three times up and three times down the allée des Acacias each noon of the season, and again at five o'clock, and each spent hours daily in the rue de la Paix, trailing long skirts of tulle and satin before the mirrors of the men-milliners, and pricing strings of pearls in the private offices of servile jewelers. Each was deftly veneered, as it were, with the bearing of the grande dame, except at the moment when she chanced to pass the other, or refer to her in the course of conversation. Then the irrepressible past came suddenly to the fore in a word or a gesture, which babbled of Gabrielle's early experience in the workroom of the very Paquin she was now patronizing, and of Thaïs's salad days as assistant to a florist on the grand boulevards. Honors were even between the two when Dodo Chapuis first came up to pay homage to the queen capital, of which he had been dreaming for four years. He was only nineteen, the son of a great manufacturer of Arles, who had lived severely and frugally, and, dying a widower, left a cool half million of francs to be divided between Dodo and his sister Louise. There seems to have been no trace of doubt in the mind of either as to the respective uses to which their dazzling inheritances should be applied. Louise promptly accepted a young playwright with a record of fourteen rejected revues, to whose suit her father had been most violently opposed; and Dodo, as promptly, took out a letter of credit for fifty thousand francs and departed for Paris on the morning following the funeral. The story of Dodo's first six weeks in the capital is the story of full a million of his kind. A pocket filled with gold and a mind emptied of responsibility; youth, health, and craving for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,--these foundations given, the aspect of the structure erected thereupon is inevitable.