having spoken scarcely any English until my old nurse, Tante Fi-Fi, died, and I was sent to the asylum. Besides, I had done a good deal of work in France—not housebreaking, you understand, but con graft at the big resorts like Aix-les-Bains and Dinard and Trouville. For all of his acuteness at home there is no such sucker as the travelling American, especially if you strike him when he's a bit lonely and has had his leg pulled by Europeans, and thinks that the American language with an Ohio accent is a guarantee of good faith. Mind you, I'd never done any mean little tricks like nicking his leather with his letter of credit and a few hundred francs, or accepting his invitation to do Montmartre at his expense and then going through him when he was filled up with the mixture of wormwood, logwood, and carbonated white wine called champagne. But I had once sold an American millionaire an original Rembrandt, which an Italian acquaintance of mine painted during the week that I was showing my friend the Louvre and a few other places. Even the United States Customs let him pay duty on it as an original, and the picture is now the pride of his part of the State. My Venetian friend and I shared up a hundred thousand francs between us, and all hands were satisfied.
But making an American think that I was the last living descendant of the Condé family and convincing an alert Parisienne that I was an Alsatian predicateur were two very different things. So I kept on reading, while my pretty companion ordered her déjeuner and went ahead with her meal. But all the time I could feel her bright, curious eyes fixed on
