| CHAPTER I | CHAPTER II | CHAPTER III | CHAPTER IV | CHAPTER V |
| CHAPTER VI | CHAPTER VII | CHAPTER VIII | CHAPTER IX | CHAPTER X |
John Durham, while he waited for Madame de Malrive to draw on hergloves, stood in the hotel doorway looking out across the Rue deRivoli at the afternoon brightness of the Tuileries gardens.
His European visits were infrequent enough to have kept unimpairedthe freshness of his eye, and he was always struck anew by the vastand consummately ordered spectacle of Paris: by its look of havingbeen boldly and deliberately planned as a background for theenjoyment of life, instead of being forced into grudging concessionsto the festive instincts, or barricading itself against them inunenlightened ugliness, like his own lamentable New York.
But to-day, if the scene had never presented itself more alluringly,in that moist spring bloom between showers, when the horse-chestnutsdome themselves in unreal green against a gauzy sky, and the verydust of the pavement seems the fragrance of lilac made visible—to-dayfor the first time the sense of a personal stake in it all, of havingto reckon individually with its effects and influences, kept Durhamfrom an unrestrained yielding to the spell. Paris might still be—tothe unimplicated it doubtless still was—the most beautiful city inthe world; but whether it were the most lovable or the most detestabledepended for him, in the last analysis, on the buttoning of the whiteglove over which Fanny de Malrive still lingered.
The mere fact of her having forgotten to draw on her gloves as theywere descending in the hotel lift from his mother's drawing-roomwas, in this connection, charged with significance to Durham. Shewas the kind of woman who always presents herself to the mind's eyeas completely equipped, as made up of exquisitely cared for andfinely-related details; and that the heat of her parting with hisfamily should have left her unconscious that she was emerginggloveless into Paris, seemed, on the whole, to speak hopefully f