She sighed and looked down pensively at her wedding-ring. Then she glanced up with a laugh, and handed Quixtus the bread and butter. “Believe me, Dr. Quixtus, this is the first time I ever heard of the rivalry. He only invented it for the sake of the epigram. Isn’t that true?” “In one way,” replied Huckaby. “I was so insignificant that you never even noticed it.” She laughed again and turned to Quixtus. “How long are you going to stay in Paris?” “Just a day or two longer—till the end of my Congress.” “Oh! How can you leave Paris when she’s looking her best without devoting a few days to admiring her? It’s unkind.” “I’m afraid Paris must get over the slight.” “But don’t you love Paris? I do. It is so fascinating; dangerous, treacherous. Plunge into it for a moment or two and it is the Fountain of Youth. Remain in the water a little longer than is prudent, and you come out shrivelled and wrinkled, with all your youth and beauty gone from you.” “Perhaps I have already had my prudent plunge,” said Quixtus; with a smile. “I’m sure you haven’t. You’ve been on dry land all the time. Worse than that—in a quaternary formation. Have you dined at Armenonville?” “In my time I have; but not this time.” “_Voilà_,” said Mrs. Fontaine. “The warm June nights, the Bois in the moonlight with all its mysteries of shadow, the fairy palace in the midst of it where you eat fairy things surrounded by the gaiety and sparkle and laughter of the world—essential and symbolical Paris—you disregard it all. And that is only one little instance. There are a thousand others. You’ve not even wetted your feet.” She embroidered her thesis very gracefully, clothing the woman of the world in a diaphanous robe of pretty fancy, revealing a mind ever so little baffling, here material, there imaginative—a mind as contradictory as her face, with its chaste contours and its alluring eyes. Quixtus listened to her with amused interest. She represented a type with which he, accustomed to the less vivid womenfolk of the learned, was unfamiliar. Without leaving Huckaby, her girlhood’s friend, out in the cold, she made it delicately evident that, of the two, Quixtus was the more worthy of attention on account of his attainments and the more attractive in his personality. Quixtus, flattered, thought her a woman of great discernment. “But you,” said he, at last. “Have you made your plunge—not that you need it—into the Fountain of Youth? Have you fed on the honeydew of the Bois de Boulogne and drunk the milk of Armenonville?”