Hellgren rose at once to the bait. "Pas mal! pas mal! You must come one day and see it."
"That would give me great pleasure," said Grover.
"Tiens!" cried the sculptor, seized with a happy thought, "Come this very afternoon. I was on the point of leaving when Mlle. Mangini came in. Let's have tea there, all three?"
Mamie's expression was calculated to let him see that Hellgren, the soul of tact, finesse, and chivalry, was inviting him into their clandestinities merely for the sake of her reputation.
Grover was a little unprepared for the prompt success of his machinations, and as they darted across Paris in one of the mad vehicles that seemed to bear a charmed life, Oscar's bulk taxing the springs to the utmost, he wondered if fate were playing her usual game: rainbow and bog.
Hellgren possessed the lease of an entire house, though a small one, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The income he was reputed to derive from iron mines in Lappland would account for the chaste marble entrance, the imported shrubberies in the court, the lovely old paintings and chests, a loveliness against which Hellgren appeared fantastic, but for which he alone was responsible. For all his bulk, Hellgren's taste was impeccable, though it ran to the massive and the mathematical, His popularity with the French, Grover reflected, had to do with his preoccupation with form. If Grover had been irritated by the angularities of the
