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full of importunities, of threats to her peace. For even if some of the flowers they carried were from Laurence, the others must come from undesired intruders. Crossly she told them, “You have knocked at the wrong door, you will find my maid in the salon along to the left,” but they bowed their heads before her sharp tone so meekly that she repented. She was always susceptible to the pathos of the army of plain women in drab gowns who moved about Paris, carrying to their more fortunate sisters their flowers and dresses and hats, serving the central purpose of the place but not partaking of its full glory, like lay sisters in a sternly governed convent. She ran back to the table by her bed, found a few francs for them, and came back, holding out her arms for their flowers.
    “Ah!” she sighed, as she took the first sheaf, and knew it was from André, since it was made of the red and white roses which he always sent her, as symbols of something or other. “These I don’t want, not at all. Will you not take them away with you, Madame, to use in your own home?”
    The women exchanged glances of embarrassment. It was as if a visitor to the convent should from kindly ignorance propose to a lay sister that she should avail herself of some privilege strictly reserved for the nuns.
    “But no, Madame,” one of them murmured hesitantly, “that’s not really possible. Why, Monsieur de Verviers might get to hear of it, and he’s one of our best customers. It would never do to annoy him.”
    “Life is difficult,” said Isabelle, and they agreed, pleased as French people always are when they are offered an established truth to rest on, as it were, in the course of their day’s work among unresolved experience; and she said goodbye and shut the door. First she put André’s flowers in the waste-paper basket, and then looked at the card to be quite sure they had come from him. “Darling, last night you were more wonderful than ever,” he had written, and she groaned aloud. It was evident that, early though it was, he had already been out and about for some time, feeling marvellously well. She saw herself successfully pursued by him through life, as one is by the income-tax authorities.
    Shuddering, she turned to the other flowers. She knew at once that Sallafranque had sent the immense and aerie sheaf of cattleyas, so fragile that they seemed not like flowers at all but like assemblies of tiny winged creatures which might decide at any moment to swarm in other shapes, or to disperse into a rising cloud. It was odd that this human barrel should choose always the most delicate and exotic flowers as the ambassadors of his so simple feelings. Since his puberty, gardens the size of a department must have lost their blossoms in the service of his desires. His card was sealed in its envelope, and was scrawled with yet another request that she should marry him at once, so honestly and humbly put that tears came to her eyes, and she put it by to slip into a pocket of her dressing-case, where she kept valuable papers. There remained the pale gold roses, which she hoped Laurence had sent her. He had indeed, and on his card he reminded her that she had promised to lunch with him that day at Laurent’s, and begged her not to fail him, since he wanted to discuss what he thought the most important matter in the whole world.
    Her heart beat so strongly that, had she not preferred restraint to all things, she would have run about the room, crying aloud, so nearly all was well. Being as she was, she lay down on the bed and kept quite still. She looked at the flowers to quieten herself with their beauty, and her thoughts went to the two plain women in their drab gowns who had so gently borne with her harshness in the corridor. Her conscience smote her that she should have so much and they should have so little. But her feeling of remorse was lessened by the suspicion that the difference in their states was in its practical effects not