Here, in an ugly little room, surrounded by hideous furniture, presided over by a gossipy, incompetent, good-hearted landlady, he felt if not at home, at least safe. Whatever he did in this dull flat passed unchallenged; if the mood seized him he might go into the kitchen and boil a cabbage, and nobody take it amiss, If he chose to stay in on a rainy day and read, or draw pictures, there was no criticism, uttered or implied. Madame and her two or three other nondescript lodgers accepted him unquestioningly as a sort of harmless embodiment of the Declaration of Independence. And in no other company was this quite the case.
Least of all in the new world on whose threshold he had stood last night,—a world peopled by the fabulous beings, human gargoyles and griffons, about whom his intellectual curiosity had long been hovering. As a youth, in the stacks of the Harvard Library, he had robbed many hours from study to scan the pages of illustrated journals published in London and Paris, and reflected enviously on theslot of those who were privileged to inhale the rarefied air breathed by the gifted, the famous, the picturesque, whose daily bread, at least in the eyes of a student, looked so much like cake. He had never dared hope that any one as commonplace as himself would ever be admitted into an exotic setting. He had supposed that some indefinable but automatically operative rule would see to that. He had come to Paris, on tip-toe, prepared to
